By Sudipta Datta

After a life in writing, Anita Desai wants her style to be pared down to the minimum so that the “silences are just as effective as the noise”. Daughter Kiran Desai doesn’t want the anger she feels about U.S. President Donald Trump and his world to disrupt her writing any more. “I have been thrown off the normal course and I want to get back to my book,” she says, a book “about power… about a young Indian woman out in India and the world” that she has been writing for a decade and which is slated to be out next year.

Unique inheritance

As mother and daughter share the stage at the Tata Steel Kolkata Literary Meet, we get a rare glimpse into the process of writing of two writers who happen to be in the same family. For Kiran Desai, her earliest memory of the ‘inheritance’ of a life in literature was that her mother had a “quietness from being a writer” who vanished every morning with extraordinary discipline to write. “Her writing life was part of our existence.” That work ethic and her imagination led to Anita Desai writing many novels that include celebrated ones like Clear Light of Day; In Custody; Fasting, Feasting; Baumgartner’s Bombay; The Village by the Sea, and her latest, the three-novellas-in-one, The Artist of Disappearance. Read more

Source: The Hindu