Description: In this trio of exquisitely crafted novellas, experience the soaring brilliance and delicate restraint
of one of Indias great writers.
In the opening novella, The Museum of Final Journeys, a junior Civil Service officer is assigned to a remote
outpost. Bored with his new surroundings, he welcomes the diversion when he is called upon by an old
retainer to help preserve the decaying treasures of one familys private museum. Tantalizing and nostalgic, this
is an allegory of time and dissolution, and of how the past erodes beauty and the present.
In the second novella, Translator Translated, a prematurely aged lecturer at a girls college chances upon the
opportunity of a lifetime when a self-absorbed publisher commissions her to translate to English a collection of
short stories of an obscure Oriya author. The assignment transforms her humdrum life, but when the authors
family complains about a translation with which she has taken artistic licence her life unravels.
Finally, in the title novella, set in Mussoorie, the reclusive son of wealthy, neglectful parents has a solipsistic
existence in the remains of a burnt house high on a mountain. The arrival of a venal film crew from Delhi,
making a film about environmental degradation, compels him to withdraw even further into seclusion.
Intense, haunting and evocative, The Artist of Disappearance is a delightful rumination on solitude and human
frailties.
About the Author Anita Desai is one of Indias foremost writers. She has written numerous works of fiction, including
Clear Light of Day (1980), In Custody (1984), and Fasting, Feasting (1999)"all shortlisted for the Man
Booker Prize"as well as Baumgartners Bombay (1988) and The Zigzag Way (2004). In Custody was
made into a film by Merchant-Ivory productions, starring Shashi Kapoor and Om Puri.
A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in London, the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New
York, Girton College and Clare Hall at the University of Cambridge, and most recently Sahitya Akademi
in India, Anita Desai has also been a Professor of Writing at MIT and has frequently been honoured with
awards among them the Alberto Moravia Prize for Literature and the Padma Shri.
Born in Mussoorie to a German mother and a Bengali father, she was educated in Delhi, and currently
divides her time between USA and Mexico.
