Note: Please enjoy my review of Darren Freebury-Jones’ Shakespeare’s borrowed feathers: How early modern playwrights shaped the world’s greatest writer for The New Criterion.
Rosarita. By Anita Desai. New York: Scribner, 2025. 112 pp. $22.
One may as well start with the dimensions. At 5” x 9”, 112 pages, Rosarita feels more like a little journal or address book than a work of fiction. If you place it too far back on the shelf it’ll simply be swallowed up by its neighbors, say Don DeLillo and Helen DeWitt, and you might not see it again. Of course, if you’ve already read lots of the eighty-seven-year-old Desai, you will greet this as the swan song, the final punctuation mark or distillation, and it will sit on that shelf beside The Complete Stories or The Village by the Sea. The earlier works apparently are “studiously realist”, with no more than hints of the fabulist approach she has taken here, but, the disqualification of not having read this author before being admitted, not much can be said about literary development: this will be a synchronic view. In giving plot summaries of what are called realist novels you can make them sound like parables, and likewise, something as slight as Rosarita will in summary sound even more like a lesson and less like an entertainment: a young Indian woman named Bonita studying Spanish in San Miguel de Allende meets a florid older local woman who tells her she knew “Rosarita”, her mother, when Rosarita had been an artist living in Mexico; Bonita says her mother’s name was just “Sarita” and that she went through no such phase, though she has to admit to herself that Sarita seemed restless and was inexplicably absent during part of her childhood in New Delhi; she fears but eventually seeks out this older woman, “the Stranger”, who takes her to the site of the art school Rosarita attended, then by plane to her childhood home in Colima where she apparently also took Rosarita; things are learned but never settled, and the mystery must be accepted as just that.
Desai narrates in the second person, which can also tend to make things sound a bit demonstrative and didactic, as in “imagine all this happened to you, how would you feel?” But the story is strange, especially once Desai gets to the Stranger’s lavish childhood home, where the arrivals are watched from the inner courtyard by a grackle perched on a fig tree. There are many such scenic touches, though few as distinctive. Desai’s narrator is busy, anyway, having free access to Bonita’s inner state, though the reports are phrased in stilted cadences, which give the narrator a kind of reserve. The reader listens to the bothersome enigma of someone who doesn’t quite sound sincere, coming out with, for instance, “It becomes unexpectedly hazardous to set out on what are meant to be pleasant explorations of a town so foreign to you. . .” It is almost sinister, and though one is not sure this is intended, it is welcome in a novel that would otherwise languish in airiness. Every narrator is a kind of host, this one in the second person more obviously so, and it is as if this speaker is trying to anticipate your feelings, and without getting them wrong, never saying the right thing and making you feel uncomfortably indebted. When you, Bonita, are tired, you “succumb to the lingering fatigue of the long journey that has brought you here.” The narration turns outward as Bonita becomes an observer, and some descriptions are slightly disordered, again to unsettling effect, like the road out of San Miguel with the “open stalls displaying mounds of fruit cut open to entice thirsty travellers in the buses that stop.” Oh, those buses that stop!
Rosarita was published in the UK in July of 2024: you can see British critics straining to see something that isn’t really there, whether a “ludic tale, as taut and weird and entrancing as a story by Jorge Luis Borges” or an “exquisite miniature”. It is not taut; it is just short, and its tendency to explain and deflate itself is nothing like a Borges fabula: “You have learnt now that you would like to believe her, yes.” And it travels too far beyond San Miguel, looking out the plane window at the landscape on the way, to be called a miniature. It is more “weird” than that, perhaps not entirely by design, in that it is like a sketch or fragment of a longer work, written in second person as if for the sake of experiment, with a solicitous, mannered voice resulting. (A speculator might say that Scribner have had to salvage and sell something). There are extended reminiscences about Sarita, which another critic recalls as a shift from second to third person, which they are not, as the moniker “Father” for Bonita’s father should make clear. This, we are told—again, mistakenly—is a replacement of the “intimacy” of second person narration with the third person and its degree of “remove and detachment; that of a past impossible to prove, let alone access”, but this “intimacy”, like the supposed sensation of being “scrutinised, observed” that another critic names, was never the actual quality of the narrative, only an intuition as to how second person narration ought to read. The solicitous narrator is serving you, not observing you. The book has bamboozled these readers, then, and they’ve had to make up some plausible sounding responses. As anyone can see, a little estrangement is the desired effect of Rosarita, so maybe by its own criterion its elusion of description makes it rather successful.