On the Shelf

THE ZIG ZAG WAYBy Anita DesaiFor long Anita Desai has made a sort of a second home in Mexico. Now the country has become part of her literar...

THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA
By Philip Roth
Recently Philip Roth joined Saul Bellow and Eudora Welty as the only writers to have had their work collected by the Library of America in their lifetime. This new novel, says Roth, is imaginative history. It explores what happens when Charles Lindbergh, who was seen as something of an apologist for Adolf Hitler, becomes president of the US. As almost always, the novel teems with doppelgangers. It is not exactly a way of re-imagining his own life. For Roth these what-ifs have instead served as a way of taking a family of decent individuals and changing their matrix by introducing a new variable. Definitely a book to catch.

THE ZIG ZAG WAY
By Anita Desai
For long Anita Desai has made a sort of a second home in Mexico. Now the country has become part of her literary geography. To be sure, home tends to be an uncertainty in Desai’s books; her characters always appear to be out of place. In her last novel, Fasting, Feasting (1999), that sense of remove informed both those who had always lived in the same place and those who were new immigrants to another land. Food — attitudes to food and the sense of ritual it imbues in daily lives — was the metaphor for this sense of belonging and unbelonging. In Zig Zag Way, past and present meet a little more definitely when a bored academic takes a sabbatical in Mexico.

THE HAMILTON CASE
By Michelle de Kretser
Murder becomes a way to inquire into the ravages of colonialism in this novel set in Sri Lanka. Questions of identity, of inherited social structures and of history are taken up in the process. The detective novel has been one of the key sites of literary innovation in recent years. No longer is it limited to Poirot-ish investigations into village murders. It is now a new form of travelogue (Donna Leon). It is a compilation of manners (Alexander McCall Smith). It is a way of mapping the complexities of cities as varied as Istanbul and London. And now, with de Kretser it is a means of post-colonial appraisal.