Buffy Byron

Anita Desai has often experimented with language, theme and form in novels like Clear Light of Day, Fasting, Feasting, Baumgartner’s Bombay and The Artist of Disappearance. In her latest, Rosarita (Picador), a dream-like novella, Desai gives the narrator a second-person voice. When a stranger plants an idea into young student Bonita’s mind, that her mother’s name was Rosarita and that she had