Desai, Anita
Persona
Anita Desai al Festivaletteratura 2003 - ©Festivaletteratura
Nata a Mussoarie in India da madre tedesca e padre bengalese, Anita Desai è cresciuta e ha studiato a Delhi. Vive tra l'India e gli Stati Uniti, dove insegna, ed è fra le massime voci della narrativa indiana contemporanea. Nell'arco di oltre venticinque anni ha scritto, in inglese, otto romanzi, un'antologia di racconti e tre libri per bambini. Celebre e acclamata in India, si è imposta con successo fra pubblico e critica in Inghilterra e negli Stati Uniti; ha vinto ambiti premi letterari a Londra e a Delhi.
Anita was born in Mussorjee (India), but her mother was German and her father a Bengali. The clearness of her prose and her accuracy in outlining miserable milieus and character's psychology, particularly the female ones, make her one of the most important authoress of Indian Literature today; yet not a feminist one, as her two best works prove: In custodia and Notte a Bombay deal with male and female characters with the same sympathetic and ironical attitude, which does not lessen the strength of the authoress´s protest against the oppressed situation women live in. Desai´s sympathy goes to those hopeless looser, whose marginalization has not reached the fascinating last degree. The peculiar trait of Desai´s prose is her attention to the detail and the extreme precision in choosing words. In her most famous novel, Digiunare, divorare, the authoress renders the desperate situation of the main female figure by letting her speech be inaccurate, inadequate to fulfil the requirements of a socially self-governing life. Anita Desai is also an appreciated authoress of children's literature. She is married, has four children and lives in New Delhi.