Rosarita
From the three times Booker-shortlisted author
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2.7 • 3 Ratings
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
'Anita Desai is a magnificent writer' - Salman Rushdie
'Every new work from her is a gift' - Kamila Shamsie
'Rosarita is transcendent . . . a testament to Desai’s enduring genius as a writer' - The Guardian
'Tantalising' - Financial Times
From three times Booker-shortlisted author Anita Desai, Rosarita is a beautiful, haunting novel that explores memory, grief, and a young woman’s determination to forge her own path.
A young student sits on a bench in a park in San Miguel, Mexico. Bonita is away from her home in India to learn Spanish. She is alone, somewhere she has no connection to. It is bliss.
And then a woman approaches her. The woman claims to recognize Bonita because she is the spitting image of her mother, who made the same journey from India to Mexico as a young artist. No, says Bonita, my mother didn’t paint. She never travelled to Mexico. But this strange woman insists, and so Bonita follows her. Into a story where Bonita and her mother will move apart and come together, and where the past threatens to flood the present, or re-write it.
Praise for Anita Desai
‘Bewitchingly beautiful’ - The Times
‘Profoundly elegiac’ - New Statesman
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this provocative if underdeveloped offering from Desai (Fasting, Feasting), an Indian woman studying Spanish in Mexico learns her late mother took a similar path many years earlier. While on a park bench in San Miguel de Allende, Bonita is approached by an older woman named Victoria, who calls her an "Oriental bird" and says she looks just like her mother, Rosarita. Bonita initially disbelieves Victoria when she claims Rosarita came to San Miguel many years ago to study art, and that Victoria met her in the very same park. Though Bonita knows nothing about her mother's travel or interest in art, she later remembers a pastel sketch of a woman on a park bench that could have been from San Miguel and considers how her mother might have sacrificed her art to raise a family. Driven to know more, Bonita finds herself running into Victoria again and again ("Could she, like a wizard or a magician, bring your mother to life again even if it is a life you never knew or suspected?" Desai writes). As Bonita follows in Rosarita's footsteps to Colima and La Manzanilla, intriguing questions are raised, but Desai merely skims the surface of her protagonist's emotions. This will leave readers wanting more.
Customer Reviews
Unfulfilled Promise
A young indian woman tries to discover her mother’s hidden career in art, seemingly having taken place in Mexico. She has been led on this path by a stranger, who suggests she knew the mother. There follows a journey in search of an art colony, with detours and brief but insignificant encounters. The reader is waiting, waiting, waiting-until suddenly, the book is finished without anything having been found.
Most of the narrative is unsatisfying with irrelevant descriptions, misleading clues.
Very flat, vague, inconsequential, outright annoying.