"Clear Light of Day" is a wonderful novel about silence and music, about the partition of a family as well as a nation, about memories that are as mutilated as the mulberries, about a past that is the unseen extra member in a party of explorers in an Antarctica of emotions, about childhood and boredom and waiting and deterioration and the desperate need for something "brighter," some "color and event and company."…

Nothing seems to happen in "Clear Light of Day," and yet everything happens, on the veranda, or while sitting down to leftovers in little saucers, "like meals for a family of kittens." We are made to know a deracinated bourgeoisie, the colonized, as they dream and repent. (p. 58)

There are moments when Anita Desai … clashes her symbols too noisily. The white cow is required to drown in the black well far too often…. And how many...