From the Bookshelf of Around the World…

Fire on the Mountain

Anita Desai

Discussion: Asia

Why we're reading this: Northern India
[close] Northern India

Find A Copy At

Libraries

Group Discussions About This Book

Showing 2 of 49 topics — 235 comments total

Asia

Mongolia, anyone?
By Andrea , Slow but steady · 5 posts · 14 views

last updated Mar 01, 2019 03:23PM

Tibet recommendations
By Andrea , Slow but steady · 5 posts · 15 views

last updated Aug 13, 2018 06:14AM

What Members Thought

Jan 09, 2015 Andrea rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction-foreign-locale, around-the-world-2016, challenge, indian-challenge-2016

Nanda Kaul is contentedly living out her twilight years in near-isolation in the Indian hillstation of Kasauli, until she receives a letter from her daughter advising that Nanda's great-granddaughter, Raka, is coming to stay. Neither Nanda nor Raka is happy with this state of affairs, but Nanda is the first to thaw. A visit from Nanda's childhood friend, Ila Das, provides some gentle comic relief as well as the set-up for the shocking climax to this story.

Actually, that's about all that happens, Nanda Kaul is contentedly living out her twilight years in near-isolation in the Indian hillstation of Kasauli, until she receives a letter from her daughter advising that Nanda's great-granddaughter, Raka, is coming to stay. Neither Nanda nor Raka is happy with this state of affairs, but Nanda is the first to thaw. A visit from Nanda's childhood friend, Ila Das, provides some gentle comic relief as well as the set-up for the shocking climax to this story.

Actually, that's about all that happens, but the treasure of this book is in Anita Desai's delicious, descriptive prose. She paints a picture of Kasauli that I can see so clearly, and the three main characters are so well-drawn that they really don't need to do very much.

On Kasauli:
It was the ravaged, destroyed and barren spaces in Kasauli that drew her: the ravine where yellow snakes slept under grey rocks and agaves growing out of the dust and rubble, the skeletal pines that rattled in the wind, the wind-levelled hilltops and the seared remains of the safe, cosy, civilized world in which Raka had no part and to which she owed no attachment.

On Ila Das:
It was this cackle, this scream of hers, Nanda Kaul thought, that held all the assorted pieces of her life together like a string or chain. It was the motif of her life, unmistakably. Such a voice no human being ought to have had: it was anti-social to possess, to emit such sounds as poor Ila Das made by way of communication.

And finally, Raka's pain at having to sit through afternoon tea with the two old women shines through:
Raka wilted. She hung her arms between her knees and drooped her head on its thin stalk. It seemed the old ladies were going to play, all afternoon, that game of old age - that reconstructing, block by gilded block, of the castle of childhood, so ramshackle and precarious, and of stuffing it with that dolls' house furniture, those impossibly gilded red velvet sofas and painted bedsteads, that always smelt of dust and mice and that she had never cared to play with.

This was my first time reading Anita Desai, but it won't be my last. ...more

7 likes · Like · see review

Jun 24, 2014 Story rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: india, novella

After a lifetime of serving others, Nanda Kaul retreats to a life of solitude in the mountains. Her independence is shattered by the arrival of a great-grand-daughter, a girl who turns out to love solitary explorations even more than her great-grandmother does.

Not much happens in this very short novel however Desai moved me with the characters she created, with her descriptions of the natural world and the ease with which she moved from dark comedy to tragedy. I know this book will linger on in ...more

4 likes · Like · see review