In the passage from Fasting, Feasting by Anita Desai, Arun, a foreign exchange student from India, much to his disdain, joins the mother and daughter of his host family, Melanie and Mrs. Patton, on a day to the beach. The complicated and warped experience that Arun faces on the day trip is characterized by the literary tools used by Anita Desai, such as diction, syntax, and rich descriptions. From the opening paragraph of the passage, Arun’s uneager disposition is shown, when he is displayed trying
and disgusting Bombay life, she doesn’t make any attempt to liberate herself from the shell of psychic paralysis and resigns herself passively to the inanimate and insipid life of Bombay which in reality is a limbo of death in life. In Fasting, Feasting, Anita Desai uses light touch, simple language, uncomplicated structure, but at the same time addresses some very big issues and makes a point. In this novel Uma and Arun are children of Mamapapa, the apparently indivisible common identity that parents
characterized simply in terms of their victimized status. One such prominent Indian author, whose writing addresses issues focusing on the condition of women in India, is Anita Desai. Desai’s novels chiefly center around the representations of women and their struggles against patriarchal and colonial oppression. Her novel Fasting Feasting (2000) is above all a work which delineates the psychic entrapment of women in a oppressive environment. Though India attained independence from colonial rule it failed
towards Anita Desai’s biography Anita Desai is an Indian novelist and short story writer. She is known for her sensitive portrayal of the inner feelings of her female characters. Many of her novels explore tensions between family members and the alienation of middle-class women. In her later novels, she wrote on varied themes such as German anti-Semitism, the demise of traditions, and Western stereotypical views of India. Anita Desai was born as Anita Mazumdar on June 24, 1937 in Mussoorie, Anita Desai's