GAMES AT TWILIGHT

by Anita Desai ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 1980

Again, as in Fire on the Mountain (1977), Desai concentrates on very specially Indian tensions rather than the Anglo/Indian culture clashes that are so popular with Indian storytellers writing in English. Almost all of these stories involve the upper, usually professional classes, but Desai's people are only tenuously connected to the West. (One major exception: the fine story ""Scholar and Gypsy."") A young student, expected by his family to do brilliantly on his exams (success can mean economic prosperity), flees to a nearby park to study and discovers a new dimension to striving. An old, asthmatic man sleeps on the balcony on a hot night when the electricity is temporarily shut down; and the unearthly beauty of the morning (""a pure pallor. . . lifted higher and higher into the dome of the sky"") rehabilitates a moment of his life. Desai's touch throughout is evocative and precise rather than shrewd or ironic. Even the one purely comic story--""Sale""--is heavily fringed with pathos: a destitute painter is visited in his studio by people he thinks will buy everything they see (they ooh and ah enough), but they buy nothing and never intended to. A strong collection, local but not parochial, by a good writer who's at her best in short-story form.

Pub Date: May 1, 1980

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1980

Categories: FICTION