From Publishers Weekly
This ninth novel by Desai ( Clear Light of Day ; Games at Twilight ), a professor at Mount Holyoke College, reflects the author's background: her mother was German, her father Indian. The novel's hero, Hugo Baumgartner, is a perpetual outsider. Raised in the comforts of a rich Berlin merchant family, he narrowly escapes the Nazis by fleeing to Calcutta. There, after some success at starting over, he is imprisoned alongside dedicated Nazis by indifferent Anglo-Indian authorities. After the war comes the upheaval of partition. Now, in the present, Baumgartner is spending his declining years in a seedy cat-filled room off a back street in Bombay. He accepts the hand life has dealt him: "Acceptingbut not accepted; that was the story of his life. . . . In Germany, . . . his darkness had marked him the Jew. . . . In India, he was fairand that marked him the firanghi foreigner." Having survived so much, a chance encounter with a dissipated German hippie brings Baumgartner the fate he had seemed, until now, to have eluded. Desai's language reveals deep knowledge of both German and Indian ways, and her rich evocation of both settings is superb. This is a quirky book, occasionally irritating in its appropriation of history for its own purposes; but Desai's artful control of her narrative's agenda re sults in a compelling fiction. Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Born in Germany, protagonist Harry Baumgartner escapes to Calcutta as a boy after his family suffers the rise of Hitler and the simultaneous fall of the Baumgartner fine-furniture business, as well as the destruction of their Jewish heritage. Imprisoned during the war as a hostile alien, Hugo moves at war's end to Bombay, where the novel--told in flashbacks--begins. Here he eventually finds his main happiness in the many cats who take over his shabby rooms. The story becomes contrived when Hugo befriends Kurt, a young, blond German hippie and dope addict whose sordid adventures in India could not have been experienced by one so young in so short a time--though they are excellently described. Still, Desai merits strong praise for her compellingly realistic descriptions of Indian life.- Glenn O. Carey, Eastern Kentucky Univ., RichmondCopyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.


Review
"Beautifully written, richly textured . . . [a] haunting story." -- Chaim Potok


Review
"A triumph."


Review
"A triumph."


Book Description
A "beautifully written, richly textured, and haunting story" (Chaim Potok), BAUMGARTNER'S BOMBAY is Anita Desai's classic novel of the Holocaust era, a story of profound emotional wounds of war and its exiles. The novel follows Hugo Baumgartner as he flees Nazi Germany -- and his Jewish heritage -- for India, only to be imprisoned as a hostile alien and then released to Bombay at war's end. In this tale of a man who, "like a figure in a Greek tragedy . . . seems to elude his destiny" (NEW LEADER), Desai's "capacious intelligence, her unsentimental compassion" (NEW REPUBLIC) reach their full height.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

A "beautifully written, richly textured, and haunting story" (Chaim Potok), BAUMGARTNER'S BOMBAY is Anita Desai's classic novel of the Holocaust era, a story of profound emotional wounds of war and its exiles. The novel follows Hugo Baumgartner as he flees Nazi Germany -- and his Jewish heritage -- for India, only to be imprisoned as a hostile alien and then released to Bombay at war's end. In this tale of a man who, "like a figure in a Greek tragedy . . . seems to elude his destiny" (NEW LEADER), Desai's "capacious intelligence, her unsentimental compassion" (NEW REPUBLIC) reach their full height.

FROM THE CRITICS

Paul West

Ms. Desai is a superb observer of the human race, achieving coloratura runs where most writers would have managed only a gasp or a gape. Like all serious novelists she puts her best energy into fingering the texture of someone's life, getting a few solid answers to the incessant question ''What is it like to be them?'' She reminds us of how tractable real-life people are, at least when compared with characters in fiction....This is a daring, colorful novel almost impossible to absorb in one reading, and rightly so because it's about imperfect knowledge. -- New York Times

Richard Bernstein

As always, Ms. Desai writes with intelligence and power. She has a remarkable eye for substance, the things that give life its texture....The book is wise and observant yet overwrought, edging into grandiloquence and improbability, the emotional drama artificially thickened by images and metaphors that are inflated and not especially fresh. -- New York Times

Publishers Weekly

Desai's exquisite, exotic 10th novel follows well-to-do European newlyweds who, in 1975, embark on a spiritual search in India. The husband, an Italian named Matteo, joins an ashram and becomes a fervent devotee of an aged, solitary guru known as ``the Mother.'' But to his skeptical German wife, Sophie, the Mother is not a fount of Eastern wisdom but a ``monster spider'' who catches ``silly flies'' like the deluded Matteo. After giving birth to a son and a daughter, both of whom she raises in the ashram, Sophie flees with her children to her in-laws' Italian villa. Vowing to unmask the Mother's true identity, she then sets off to Alexandria. There, through flashbacks, we meet Laila, a free-spirited teenager, half-Egyptian, half-French, who moves to Paris, rebels against her bourgeois aunt and joins an Indian dance troupe. Falling in love with Krishna, the troupe's charismatic, aloof leader, Laila tours Venice and 1920s New York before moving with him to India, where she later renounces dance for enlightenment and transforms herself into the Mother. The story closes with excerpts from Laila's India diary and with Sophie's confrontation with the wizened, aged Krishna, whom she tracks down in Bombay. Desai (Baumgartner's Bombay) magically evokes the collision and melding of cultures and ideas as she maps the hazards and rewards of spiritual quest. (Aug.)