Eric's quest

In his long career in fiction? Anita Desai has won deserved praise for its elegant prose and big flags intelligence with which she explores the culture and character. In his fourteenth novel? half Bengali? half-German Desai? which often focus on India and Indians living in other places? (Desai? 176) turns in another land: Mexico. In Zigzag path? she lights up that country? the prospects and the history and the intertwined lives of three very different foreigners who venture there? with characteristic grace? skill and acumen.

We first meet Eric in aimless American graduate student trying to expand his thesis on immigration in the book. It follows a more disciplined and competent scientist girlfriend for research trips to Mexico. (Desai? 176) Eric accidentally learns that his grandfather once worked in the Cornish mines in Mexico and set out to learn more. His pursuit takes its property older? overbearing and eccentric doni Vera? who fled Austria during World War II? perhaps because of Nazi ties and was married to a Mexican family man? whose fate had been in the mining industry. She lived as "Peak Sierra and self-appointed defender of the Huichol Indians. In the egocentric? autocratic woman suffers secret anguish; she resents Erika queries of mine. Doña Vera libraries? however? teaches him about the mine works. Upon learning that the porters carried heavy bags? thousands of stairs to use the zigzag air currents that help them breathe? Eric ruminates on his own zigzag journey? his efforts to travel to the past. (Desai? 176)

This trip brings him almost deserted town? just before the Day of the Dead. We then returned to the past? when we meet Eric grandmother? Betty Jennings? a courageous? attractive young woman who travels to Mexico in 1910 to marry a Cornish miner. (Desai? 176) Soon Betty in an intriguing life in Mexico will be thrown into chaos by the beginning of the Revolution and ends abruptly at the time of birth.

The daughter of a Bengali father and a German mother? Anita Desai was born in India but has made her home in Great Britain and in the United States. Thus she can write with authority about conflicts between cultures and about the presence of the past? as she did in novels like Baumgartner's Bombay (1988)? the story of an elderly German Jew in India? and Fasting? Feasting (2000)? in which an Indian student tries to adapt to the ...