SOURCE: Parameswaran, Uma. Review of Journey to Ithaca, by Anita Desai. World Literature Today 71, no. 1 (winter 1997): 221.

In the following review, Parameswaran praises the complexity of the human relationships in Journey to Ithaca but finds their resolutions “too simplistic.”

Over a span of two decades and ten novels, Anita Desai has built up a solid repertoire and a reputation for sensitive insights into human behavior and finesse of language appropriate for expressing them. Journey to Ithaca is a story of the European “flower children” of the 1960s and 1970s who flocked to India and Nepal in search of a kind of spirituality that their lives seemed to lack. Armed with idealism, they reached out to the gold at the end of the rainbow. But their journey took them through the phase of substance abuse—as we now euphemistically call it—and many never came out of that phase. A...