SOURCE: Gerster, Robin. “Geographies of the Imagination.” Lancet 359, no. 9301 (12 January 2002): 178.

In the following review, Gerster praises the themes, style, and settings of Diamond Dust.

English-language writers from Commonwealth countries tend to be lumbered with the role of “representative” of their country of origin. Thus India's Anita Desai is usually dubbed an Indian writer. This is not necessarily a limiting description, but it is a prescriptive label that inspires those cliches beloved by western commentators on Asian writers—a “clash of cultures,” “East meets West,” and so on. Of course, the westernisation of India and the cultural consequences of the Indian diaspora is one of Desai's major fictional interests. But the map of her fiction is more than merely sociological. Desai's is a geography of the mind and the emotions, an intimate register of that most basic form of politics, those of familial relationships. Her “Indianness,” while essential, is...