Zigzag Way

By Anita Desai

Book Overview

In The Zigzag Way, the critically acclaimed novelist Anita Desai offers a gorgeously nuanced story of expatriates and travelers adrift in an unfamiliar land. Eric, a young American historian, has come to Mexico on his first trip abroad. His search for his immigrant family's roots brings him to a town in the Sierrra Madre, where a hundred years earlier Cornish miners toiled without relief. Here the suspiciously enigmatic Dona Vera, the fierce Austrian widow of a mining baron, has become a local legend, but her reputation for philanthropy glosses over a darker history. A haunting, powerful novel that culminates on the Day of the Dead, The Zigzag Way examines the subtle interplay between past and present.

Anita Desai is the author of many acclaimed works of fiction, including Baumgartner's Bombay, Clear Light of Day, Diamond Dust, and Fasting, Feasting, among other works. Three of her novels have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. A professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she now lives in New York.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0618619801
• ISBN13: 9780618619801
• Release Date: February 2006
• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Length: 160 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.2" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

The Zigzag Way

Beautifully written with some of the most vivid descriptions of modern Mexico I have read. Maintains interest, but the plot goes into extensive development of certain characters only to abandon them. And the ending was less than satisfying. Yet a deeply talented writer worthy of the read.

A luminous novel set in Mexico

Eric O'Brien is an uncertain and awkward young man, a would-be writer and a traveller in spite of himself. Happy to follow his more confident girlfriend Em to Mexico, he is overwhelmed with sensory overload and gradually seduced by the strangeness, the colour, the mysteries of an older world and its celebrations of the Dia de los Muertos. He finds himself in a curious quest for his own family in a ghost mining town, now barely inhabited, where almost a hundred years earlier young Cornish miners worked the rich seams in the earth. Until Pancho Villa and revolution came to Mexico. A recording of this novel is available from BBC Audiobooks and Eleanor Bron's reading is truly breathtaking. Highly recommended.

ONE OF THOSE HARD-TO-FIND SMALL GEMS

My reading has declined by 75% this past year for the lack of finding books like this one. I learned more about Mexico in 160 pages than in 4 visits there. The author has an incredible ability to focus with lightning pace on both the thrust of plot and smallest details, but never through use of excess words. We start in an East Coast college where a young guy follows his scientist girl friend to Mexico and as they separate for her to do her work, the young man goes deeper into the mountains of Mexico and almost loses himself in the history he trudges up in the pursuit of the story of his Mexican grandfather. Many readers will say, Oh Yuck! and ignore books like this, turning to another James Petterson re-hash. Too bad, but that's freedom.