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- The Artist of Disappearance Reviewed By Sandra Shwayder Sanchez of Bookpleasures.com
The Artist of Disappearance Reviewed By Sandra Shwayder Sanchez of Bookpleasures.com
- By Sandra Shwayder Sanchez
- Published March 2, 2012
- GENERAL FICTION REVIEWS
Sandra Shwayder Sanchez
Reviewer Sandra Shwayder Sanchez: Sandra is
a retired attorney and co-founder of a small non-profit publishing
collective: The Wessex Collective with whom she has published two short fiction collections
(A Mile in These Shoes and Three Novellas) and one
novel, Stillbird.
Her most recent novel, The Secret of A Long Journey is soon to be released by Floricanto Press in April 2012 and her first novel, The Nun, originally published by Plain View Press in 1992 is being  reissued in a 2nd Edition with additional material by PVP in March 2012.
Follow Here To Purchase The Artist of Disappearance
Author: Anita Desai
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 978-0-547-57745-6
The Artist of Disappearance is the last and title novella of this collection of three novellas and, for me the best of the three. The primary character, Ravi, creates artistic arrangements of nature and if you love nature as I do, you’ll love the images evoked herein.
“Outdoors was freedom.
Outdoors was the life to which he chose to belong – the life of
the crickets springing out of the grass, the birds wheeling hundreds
of feet below in the valley or soaring upwards above the mountains,
and the animals invisible in the undergrowth, giving themselves away
by an occasional rustle or eruption or cries of flurried calls;
plants following their own green compulsions and purposes, almost
imperceptibly, and the rocks and stones, seemingly inert but
mysteriously part of the constant change and movement of the earth.
One had only to be silent, aware, observe and perceive – and this
was Ravi’s one talent as far as anyone could see.” (p. 101)
The author’s talents
include this talent to observe and perceive and then to put these
images into the minds eye of the reader with arrangements of words as
carefully crafted as the secret garden landscapes created by Ravi.
The second novella in the collection is titled Translator Translated and is about a woman who grows up hearing, speaking, and loving the dialect of her mother from a small rural area. She discovers the work of a woman who writes in this dialect and convinces a publisher that this woman’s work should be introduced to a wider audience, translated into English. She is hired to do this work and the author reveals her own special relationship to language:
“I was only the
conduit, the medium between that language and this – but I was the
one doing the selecting, the discriminating, and I was the only one
who could: the writer herself could not. I was interpreting the text
for her because I had the power – too strong a word perhaps, but
the ability, yes. I was also the one who knew what she meant, what
worlds her words evoked. . . . . the act of translation
brought us together as if we were sisters – or even as if we were
one, two compatible halves of the one writer.” (pp.60-61)
I highly recommend The Artist of Disappearance to lovers of nature, and perfectly, poetrically arranged language.