Fasting, Feasting - Couverture rigide

A wonderful novel in two parts, moving from the heart of a close-knit Indian household, with its restrictions and prejudices, its noisy warmth and sensual appreciation of food, to the cool centre of an American family, with its freedom and strangely self-denying attitudes to eating. In both it is ultimately the women who suffer, whether, paradoxically, from a surfeit of feasting and family life in India, or from self-denial and starvation in the US. Or both. Uma, the plain, older daughter still lives at home, frustrated in her attempts to escape and make a life for herself. Her Indian family is difficult, demanding but mostly, good-hearted. Despite her disappointments, Uma comes through as the survivor, avoiding an unfulfilling marriage, like her sister's, or a suicidal one, like that arranged for her pretty cousin. And in America, where young Arun goes as a student, men in the suburbs char hunks of bleeding meat while the women don't appear to cook or eat at all - seems bewildering and terrifying to the young Indian adolescent far from home...

"Desai has a wicked, subtle humour...and her characters are beautifully described... Her writing is polished and mature, with a wit she cleverly underplays" (Daily Telegraph)

"Anita Desai is one of Tolstoy's inheritors. Like his, her writing is sensuous, radical and uncannily perceptive... Fasting, Feasting is a hypnotically readable story, in language which has the precision of poetry...an ambitious, successful and disturbing novel" (The Times)

"A compelling, mature work by India's finest writer in English" (Independent)

"A quiet, low-key novel, notable for its vignettes...[which] are so sharp, so rich in detail, that the book packs a real polemic punch...Fasting Feasting is a fine showcase for the delicate, distinctive skills of Anita Desai" (Sunday Telegraph)