Rosarita

Sam's Review 

Given that Anita Desai is now 97, Rosarita may well be the last book from this thrice Booker-shortlisted writer. It also riddles a story that two weeks later, I’m still trying to unravel. 
 
Bonita, the Indian protagonist, arrives in the small Mexican town of San Miguel de Allende to study a language course. One day, sitting in the town square, she is affectionately accosted by a woman dressed in “a flurry of scarves and skirts.” The woman claims to know Bonita’s mother, who she calls Rosarita, having supposedly met her years ago when she came to this town to study art. But Bonita's mother is not called Rosarita. She never visited Mexico, never studied art, never even painted. Or did she?
 
As Bonita begins to believe the woman’s claims, she also begins to question what else she may have got wrong about her mother, and about her own childhood. Memories return of her patriarchal grandfather "twisting his long black, oiled moustache and yelling”; of her parents’ aloof, transactional marriage; and of her mother disappearing for a short time. Is this when her mother came to Mexico? Was the single painting “a sketch in wishy-washy pale pastels” hanging in her childhood home her mother’s work? Or is the Mexican woman a trickster, a fraud? Or perhaps a lonely soul concocting stories in search of human connection?
 
In a section triggered by the memory of her mother’s absence, Bonita imagines the possible cause of that inexplicable disappearance: an art exhibition at the Mexican Embassy in New Delhi. It feature murals inspired by the Mexican revolution and Indian partition: “scene after scene of carnage: a knife-thrust here, a skull smashed open there.” Did the scenes bring back trauma from her mother's childhood, impelling her to escape the confines of her marriage? 
 
Two weeks after reading Rosarita I'm still not sure of my response. The story, the characters and the themes remain elliptical, a wash of vivid colour open to different interpretations. Is the book about how little we know our parents, the conflict of family duty and personal ambition, or the way generational trauma haunts those who didn't experience the original distress? Whatever the case, I have a feeling I'll be thinking about Rosarita for quite some time.

Publisher's Review 

From three times Booker-shortlisted author Anita Desai, Rosarita is a beautiful, haunting novel that explores memory, grief, and a young woman’s determination to forge her own path. 

A young student sits on a bench in a park in San Miguel, Mexico. Bonita is away from her home in India to learn Spanish. She is alone, somewhere she has no connection to. It is bliss. And then a woman approaches her. The woman claims to recognize Bonita because she is the spitting image of her mother, who made the same journey from India to Mexico as a young artist. No, says Bonita, my mother didn’t paint. She never travelled to Mexico. But this strange woman insists, and so Bonita follows her. Into a story where Bonita and her mother will move apart and come together, and where the past threatens to flood the present, or re-write it. 

Praise for Anita Desai

'Anita Desai is a magnificent writer' - Salman Rushdie

‘The language is hypnotically beautiful and subtle and the characterisation quietly precise’ - Financial Times 

‘Bewitchingly beautiful’ - The Times 

‘Profoundly elegiac’ - New Statesman