Anita Desai on the paradox of great literature and how her writing has changed through time
When anita desai started writing in the 1960s, she had no room of her own; no big advances, nor publishers interested in contemporary literature in English. Writing, she says, was her secret—carried out between her children’s games and classes. And it is the hidden inner lives of women and men—most of them outsiders in their society —that her fiction is concerned with in works such as The Clear Light of Day, In Custody, Fasting, Feasting, and Baumgartner’s Bombay. Last year, Random House re-issued three of her novels as part of a series; two more are being reissued this month (Fasting, Feasting and Fire on the Mountain) besides a collection of her short stories, which includes a story not published before, The Landing.

Many mistake the small, private universes of her characters as placid. But Desai is the true inheritor of Jane Austen, unsparing in revealing the warped violence of family life.
She moved to the US in the mid-1990s and remains the lonely writer, living an unhurried life in Cold Spring, a village near New York, without an Internet connection. In this interview (she faxed back her answers), she talks about her life, literature and the other writer in the family

The Landing, the newest story in the collection of your short stories, seems a spare version of a theme that has occurred a lot in your work—the woman and the house. When did you write it? Why did you choose it to be part of this collection?
Random House thought that instead of an introduction, I might use a new story as a kind of foreword—really, to bring the collection up to date and have the oldest and the newest as bookends. I had the story with me and sent it in. It’s an idea that came to me when I was living in an 18th century house in a little Massachusetts town. Joseph Brodsky lived at the back of it and also wrote of it in an essay about his parents; he had the fancy that a pair of large rooks that lived in a tree embodied their spirits. It was a house that suggested invisible spirits; the story was about invisible presences, about absences.

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