SOURCE: "Anita Desai's Fiction: A New Dimension," in Indian Literature, Vol. XXIV, No. 2, March-April, 1981, pp. 44-53.

In the essay below, Asnani examines the themes of "alienation and incommunication" in Where Shall We Go This Summer?, stating that Desai's "fiction grapples with the intangible realities of life."

My writing is an effort to discover, underline and convey the significance of things. I must seize upon that incomplete and seemingly meaningless mass of reality around me and try and discover its significance by plunging below the surface and plumbing the depths, then illuminating those depths till they become a more lucid, brilliant and explicable reflection of the visible world.

The fiction of Anita Desai adds a new dimension to Indo-English Writing. Turning inward her fiction grapples with the intangible realities of life, plunges into the innermost depths of the human psyche to fathom its mysteries, the inner turmoil, the chaos...