The Artist of Disappearance (English, Undefined, Desai Anita)

In the first novella, entitled The Museum of Final Journeys, a junior Civil Service Officer finds himself assigned to a remote outpost in India. He is quickly bored by his new surroundings and when he is called upon by an old retainer to assist in preserving the decaying treasures of one family’s private museum, he jumps at the chance for some amusement. What he discovers is a return to the past, in a journey which shows how time erodes all. In Translator Translated, a woman teaching at a girls’ college finds age tugging at her, more from her tensions and worries than from the ravages of time itself, and when a self-absorbed publisher commissions her to translate to English a collection of short stories of an obscure Oriya author, she takes up the chance and finds that the opportunity is changing her boring life. The author’s family contacts her, furious that she took artistic license with a work, and her life slowly unravels. In titular novella, a son of wealthy, neglectful parents is a loner, and considers only his existence as definite, in a display of solipsism as he lives in the remains of a burnt house high on a mountain. A corrupt film crew from Delhi arrives, wishing to film a documentary about environmental degradation. Their intrusion into his existence forces him to withdraw even further, and become an expert in the art of disappearance. Intense and evocative, these stories touch upon the human heart in ways only Anita Desai knows how, and drag readers into a world she makes her own