Voices in the City

by Anita Desai

Based on the life of the middle class intellectuals of Calcutta, it is an unforgettable story of a Bohemian brother and his two sisters caught in the cross-currents 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 altogether dead, and the emergent ones not fully evolved.

Genres: Fiction, India, Novels

257 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1965

About the author

Anita Desai was born in 1937. Her published works include adult novels, children's books and short stories. She is a member of the Advisory Board for English of the National Academy of Letters in Delhi and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in London. Anita Mazumdar Desai is an Indian novelist and Emeritus John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has been shortlisted for the Booker prize three times. Her daughter, the author Kiran Desai, is the winner of the 2006 Booker prize.

Reviews

[Jane E · Rating 1 out of 5]

Awful! I kept hoping that it would get better but if anything it got worse. A book full of flowery passages and unsympathetic characters - at least I think they are unsympathetic but who would know given the obscurity of the writing. Just really bad. (Purchased at Pilgrims Book House, Kathmandu, Nepal)

[Summaiya · Rating 4 out of 5]

A profoundly visual book. Every line, every page brings a new set of images to mind (though the images themselves may not be altogather pleasent to behold) and it is a blunt potrayal of the life of financially limited people living in the city. All things considered it is not a bad book.

[Sneha Jaiswal · Rating 1 out of 5]

Voices in The City was part of my literature course when I was in college and I remember absolutely hating it. The follows three siblings, one of them dies, and their mom basks in the tragedy, elevating herself to a level of a grieving Goddess, someone who is about others, because now she is a mom, who has lost a grown child. That's essentially it. Or at least what I remember of it.

Grief makes some people jerks? Yes, it does. We didn't need a mandatory, boring novel for it.

I can't say the same about the other novels that we had read as lit students. This was the most pointless novel of them all. It had no message. The writing was not awe-inspiring.

It just felt like an absolute waste of time.

[Aabir · Rating 1 out of 5]

what i didnt like about the book was that the story just didnt move forward...it seemed like the characters arejust stuck....neverthless the description of the environment through the author's words are commendable.

[Citrus · Rating 4 out of 5]

wonderfully written. unforgettable characters and atmosphere.

[Janani · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amazing portrayal of human behaviour

[Adrija · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think I killed a part of myself while reading this book. I'm a fair fan of Indian writing , and Indian writing in English, but Anita Desai has never been to my taste, ever. I forced myself to sit through this book till the end, only because it's prescribed in my syllabus. Indian authors writing in English are victims of a colonial hangover, and they try so much to emulate the western ideals. One can clearly trace the blind mimicry (not influence, but mimicry) of Woolf's writing style in this novel. Desai tries to shape her characters through interior monologues, much in the style of Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, but fails miserably as the prose ends up being slanted, oblique and frustrating for the most part. Like the inhabitants of Eliot's wartorn London wasteland, Desai's hollow-men inhabit a morose and soul sucking Calcutta landscape, but Desai fails to bring about the emotions succinctly. Out of this pathetic excuse for a novel, the only thing I seemed to have moderately enjoyed was the visual depiction of Calcutta. It was quite vivid and accurate. Other than that, nothing seemed to work for me. The characters are flat, lacking dimension. The dialogues are animated and mechanical. The absence of a plot for the stream of consciousness technique makes it a difficult novel to follow. Their is no advancement of action, whatsoever.
One cannot say that Desai doesn't poses the craft of writing - she is pretty marvellous at it. Words tumble down her pen with grace and they come together in an admirable fashion. But what her technique lacks is the soul - her vocabulary is amazing but her words don't convey any emotion. That's the greatest lack. Her writing is only a beautiful facade of flowery language, without a profound passionate core. Not at all worthy of the sahitya akademi honor.

[Sarban Bandyopadhyay · Rating 5 out of 5]

A calm novel that rests almost wholly on its characters, with long paragraphs that nosedive into the streams of their consciousnesses. It builds up a rare picture of Calcutta as much honest to its materialities as to the thoughts it invokes. Exploring perfectly ordinary people dwelling in a perfectly ordinary city, it still offers glimpses of surprise.

[Rajat Narula · Rating 3 out of 5]

Protagonist's struggle with the oppressive Calcutta. Thoughtful.

[Rebekah Daniel]

The book set in Calcutta, has resonated with me as a young graduate in an urban Indian setting. The confluence of the siblings' views on life, their interactions with the circles in Calcutta and their past with their mother intermingling with their present, has set up a moving framework for the siblings, Nirode, Monisha and Amla to reach the tipping point of their selves against the world.

Nirode, was the most interesting character as a young man who quit his job with the newspaper, and took up the task of editing his own magazine. His goings about reflected his road down failure after failure, corroded into abject poverty and starvation, but with such pride, that I found it hard to pity him. Amla, was the character I saw myself in, crushed down by the murk of the city, disgusted by the claustrophobia it induced.

All in all, voices in the city, sounded out the voices in the city while the city, they felt, treated the sources, their bodies and souls with contempt and misunderstanding.