THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 8, 1995 TAG: 9510050490
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY SHARON WEINSTEIN
LENGTH: Medium: 79 lines
JOURNEY TO ITHACA
ANITA DESAI
Alfred A. Knopf. 309 pp. $23.
Journey to Ithaca does not yield itself easily to the reader. Like its characters Matteo, Sophie and The Mother - who get lost and confused in their wanderings - so is the reader led around the center of the story as in a maze.
Anita Desai is a sophisticated storyteller who circles around her tale, rather than tell it straight. The texture of her language is so lyrically thick, sometimes the plot is obscured. She presents India itself as a character: mysterious, contradictory, rich and elusive.
I forced myself to plow through the first third of the novel, then suddenly, I was very happy I was in the thick of it.
It was Sophie who finally captured me.
In the early sections of the novel, Sophie is an appendage to her husband, Matteo, who is desperately searching for the meaning of his life in India. Matteo was raised in Italy, a dissatisfied youth who engaged in destructive behavior until his tutor gave him Herman Hesse's The Journey to the East. Imbued with a vision of enlightenment, Matteo drags Sophie with him to one ashram, one holy man and one pilgrimage after the other.
Sophie, German-born, is practical, worldly and in love with her husband. She hates and fears India.
On the mundane level, Sophie cannot deal with Indian customs. In the communal baths she marvels at how the Indian women ``all bathed under the taps in their saris, then somehow managed to remove the wet clothes from under the dry ones, with no flash of nudity in between.'' When Sophie attempts the same maneuvers, she is mocked.
On a deeper level, Sophie is haunted by the death around her. On one of their pilgrimages, an Indian mother, with seven children already dead, has the sickly eighth child with her in the hope that prayers at the Shrine will save him. A man explains to Sophie: ``If this boy dies, she cannot go back to her husband. His family will blame her.''
Later, Sophie sees the child on the ground, lying in a fold of the woman's sari, ``terribly still.'' Sophie cannot move, knowing that she is ``afraid to look at death.''
When Matteo finally reaches the point of his most complete attachment, as a disciple of The Mother, Sophie's disdain reaches its apex. She remains with Matteo at The Mother's ashram for a few years, but she is miserable. She gives birth to Giacomo - refusing to let him be named Prem Krishna by The Mother.
The tensions between Matteo and Sophie are apparent to everyone. The ashram watches, ``in silence, to see who would win.'' Matteo, in exasperation, says to his wife: ``Sophie, Sophie, will you believe only what you see?'' She returns: ``What do you find so hateful that you must become someone else?''
This time, after Sophie gives birth to her second child, Isabel, the divisions between them are too stark. Sophie throws Matteo's words in his face: ``The Absolute, the Soul, the Supreme. Supra this and supra that. I am sick of them. They are non-words.''
Matteo responds, ``And what words do you like? . . . Food. Bed. Baby. House. Are those your words?''
``Yes. Yes!'' she responds. ``They are good words and I like them.''
Sophie leaves with the children, takes them to their grandparents and begins a journey of her own. She discovers that the outside world is as much a prison as the ashram. Then she makes it her mission to track down the facts of The Mother's life, in order to expose her as a fraud, thereby regaining her husband.
The last third of Journey to Ithaca, which traces Sophie's search for the truth about The Mother, becomes a tapestry of an extraordinary woman's life. What Sophie discovers is that at the end of every journey is one's self.
Desai's novel ends where it begins, as it circles back into itself. A journey, for the reader, worth taking. MEMO: Sharon Weinstein is an English professor at Norfolk State University and
author of a book of poems, ``Celebrating Absences.'' by CNB