In Rosarita, Booker Prize-shortlisted Anita Desai gives our heroine an uneven footing from the first, and the reader shares in the confusion (at least I sure did). Bonita is a young woman accosted one afternoon by a theatrical older woman. She is dropped into a situation that leaves both character and reader in the dark. The true measure of Desai as an author lies in the economy of language in this slim volume; nothing goes to waste. The lovely town of San Miguel de Allende in Mexico is rendered painterly but reservedly. Desai was inspired by a Punjabi artist who painted murals with Diego Rivera named Satish Gujral, and it shows in her descriptions. You can picture every feather on the pigeons that linger in the beautiful Jardin and hear the burbling fountains where Bonita first meets the mysterious Victoria, who claims to have been a dear friend of her mother, and our title character Rosarita.
Hints are given along the way as Bonita attempts to connect the art student with distant memories of her mother in India. As she takes a siesta one afternoon, she recalls a portrait in their home of a mother and daughter disengaged from one another, the child playing with the sand at her feet and the mother glancing at something more interesting in the distance. These details resonate as Bonita slowly realizes many things in a short time, using both the Mexican revolution and the 1947 Indian partition as parallels to the smaller detail that her mother was deeply unhappy at home in India. But who Rosarita was in Mexico remains an enigma.
Each paragraph is a tiny, impactful poem. At the suggestion of Veronica, Bonita travels to other parts of Mexico in search of clues to complete the puzzle of who her mother truly was:
“A change in the air wakes you. It has become warm, humid, lifting off the ocean which is still invisible as you descend from the forested hills and gorges of Colima in rapid swoops and swerves, but there is no mistaking its closeness when you turn off the highway onto a flat sandy plain, dried grasses standing in what must once have been marshes, now drained. An egret takes off from a still, reflective pool, trailing its legs like afterthoughts, and you feel it lift you with it into the hazy light.” (77)
While this book doesn’t follow a typical narrative path, it is deeply moving and will stay with me for a long time. It reminds the reader of the power of precisely chosen details, and the artistry in a disciplined rendering of place.
Readers looking for other books dealing with family secrets, questions of identity and the slippery nature of truth might like Martyr! By Kavah Akbar or White Ivy by Susie Yang.
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Categories: Books and More, Library News
Tags: Books and More, Library News