Voices in the City : Book Review

Mabel Annie Chacko (India, 04/11/06)

Anita Desai, novelist, short story writer, children’s author, was born in 1937 in Mussoorie, India, to an Indian father and a German mother. Desai was first published in the 1960s and was immediately praised as the finest of her generation of Indian writers in English. Her novels evoked characters, events and moods with recourse to a rich use of visual imagery and details. The origin of her stories, as she herself admits, is rooted in images: ‘there are so many images that remain in the mind… stay with you…’ Anita Desai’s style is lucid, tight, undramatic…Her imagistic prose acquires and ambiguous and terrible power- the words hold down the events forcibly.

Based on the life of the middle-class intellectuals in Calcutta, ‘Voices in the City’ is an unforgettable story of a bohemian brother and his two sisters caught in the cross-current of changing social values. In many ways, the story reflects a vivid picture of India’s social transition- a phase in which the older elements are not all together dead, and the emergent ones are not fully evolved. Desai succeeds in creating a living, imaginative and eloquent picture of India.

The novel has its thematic core in Nirode’s pursuit for a higher level of living than that of the common man. Another important theme in the novel is that of anonymity of the true artist. This theme is also expressed through the character of Nirode who has high esteem for the artists of Ajanta and Ellora, Kornak, and Khajuraho, who were never bothered about fame.  Nirode is of the view that such anonymity should be followed in the field of writing too.

The theme of relationships in ‘Voices in the City’ is also that which is pursued by Desai in ‘Cry, The Peacock’, where she comments on man-woman love. In ‘Voices in the City’, there is no instance of acceptable love and satisfied lover. Nirode’s mother’s ‘love’ for Major Chadha is seen as meaningless. There is only a fleeting reference to his mother’s love for his father. There is no reference to the love between Monisha and her husband, and the love which Amla has for Dharma is purely platonic, higher, and idealistic. Yet another theme dealt with in the novel is of privacy, through the character of Monisha, who gets the privacy of her room as a bride, but when her infertility becomes increasingly evident, even this privacy is taken away. She is reduced to a bonded slave.

The city of Calcutta functions as an active agent, pressing upon the multitudinous voices of its citizens, reducing most of the population- both male and female- to insects. The characters indulge themselves in activities that lead them no where. The city of Calcutta is seen as a perpetual Wasteland- it has an air of emotional, intellectual and spiritual stagnation; anyone who wishes to come out of this stagnation is seen as a rebel and is reduced to the plight of an insect or some other dreadful creature of Nature.  The image of the city of Calcutta as a pus-filled boil goes a long way in portraying the misery of its inhabitants. Apart from this, Anita Desai used other images like that of the ‘kangaroo with an empty pouch’ to show Monisha’s infertile state, that of Kalimpong as the ideal world far from the city of Calcutta.

Sometime Anita Desai experiments with diction and style, and the grammatical structure is temporarily suspended; the impression created is that of telegraphic language:

        “Eyeless angels, odourless lilies, bloated doves with missing beaks….”

Through such phrases, Desai attempts to give verbal form to Nirode’s thoughts.

The Narration contains all the ugliness, unhappiness and despair; the image chosen appropriately goes a long way in expressing the characters’ inner thought process, and indirectly, the style achieves the effect of the Stream-of-Consciousness technique.

Most of her novels are accused for not having a story. I wouldn’t comment on that. However, I’ll like to add that nonetheless, Anita Desai takes us on a psychological trip into the mind of her characters, something that distinguishes this novelist from the rest.

I’ll conclude with the following quote from the Sunday Times, London:

“Voices in the City has a vitality that highlights a compulsive

creative talent…There is a convincing fury about this novel.”

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