SOURCE: "Ambiguous Tragic Flaw in Anita Desai's Fire on the Mountain, in International Fiction Review, Vol. 17, No. 1, 1990, pp. 3-8.

Below, Phillips examines elements of Greek tragedy in Fire on the Mountain.

The Indian author Anita Desai creates in Fire on the Mountain (1977) a perfect tragedy in the Greek mode. Though fiction, Fire on the Mountain contains the nobility of character, tight structure, sense of retrospective inevitability, ambiguous flaw, and recognition of complicity which Aristotle so admired in 5th-century B.C. plays. Nanda Kaul is a noble woman who, after a long life spent serving a large family, wants only to retreat to a quiet sanctuary, Carignano. Instead, the family puts a great-granddaughter, Raka, into her charge. Raka proves to be as independent and unapproachable as Nanda, and, in her rebelliousness, sets fire at the end of the book to the hillside on which her great-grandmother's house perches. During...