Baumgartner's Bombay

by Anita Desai (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1989

  $3.36

  Matteo and Sophie join the 1970s flight of young Europeans to India. Matteo - Italian, raised in the luscious countryside around Lake Como, restless since childhood - has been introduced by a tutor to Hermann Hesse's The Journey to the East, and it opens in him a desperate longing. Sophie - German, practical, worldly - is willing to follow him to the ends of the earth. In India, together they visit swamis, gurus, ashrams - always searching. Matteo is seeking spiritual enlightenment, but for Sophie fulfillment lies in earthly love. And when they meet a holy woman known as the Mother, the differences between them seem to explode. When we learn the Mother's story, we see it as an earlier version of their own - the story of a young girl growing up in Cairo and finding her way East by joining a troupe of Indian dancers she has met in Europe. Her journey, a young woman's daring progress through Paris and Venice and New York, until she finds her moment of transcendence in India, comments on, and gives added breadth to, the young couple's quest.

• Used

  Paperback
  2001

  $3.36

  Hugo Baumgartner, the central character of Anita Desai's dazzling novel, is a wandering Jew all his life. From the agonising scenes of his childhood in pre-war Berlin, through his spell in business in Calcutta and then Bombay, he simply does not belong. Too dark for Hitler's society he is too fair for India; he remains a firanghi, a foreigner, wherever he goes' Daily Telegraph 'Anita Desai writes beautifully, employing an opulent vocabulary to great effect in her physical descriptions.The achievement of a superior writer' Literary Review'A book that puts to shame all the little epithets and pert cliches that praise may offer' London Review of Books

• Used

  Hardcover
  1988

  $3.36