Novel
Clear Light of Day
Anita Desai · 1980
Synopsis
Tara, who has long lived abroad with her diplomat husband, comes back to spend a few days in the house of her childhood, in old Delhi. Still living there are her elder sister Bim, who teaches at a girls' college and remains unmarried after caring for their parents and an old aunt, and their brother Baba, who is autistic. The visit revives memories and old jealousies, which also involve their brother Raja, brilliant and admired; the book then goes back to their youth.
Context
The novel appeared in 1980 from Heinemann in London and Harper in New York. The author built it in four parts, on the model of T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets, which she cites in the epigraph: it opens in the Delhi of 1980, goes back to the adolescence and childhood of four siblings, at the time of the Partition, then returns to the present. She set it in the neighbourhood where she had grown up and held it to be the most autobiographical of her books.
Who it is for
A novel of about two hundred pages, in four parts that move back and forth between the present and childhood; knowing what the Partition of 1947 was sheds light on the family's silences.
Prizes and reception
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1980, the first of the author's three novels so distinguished; one of her most widely read and studied books.
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