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The Zigzag Way: A Novel
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Product Description
Eric is a newly minted historian just out of graduate school, unsure of his past choices and future options. With no clear direction, he follows his lover, Em, when she travels to the Yucatan for her scientific research, but he ends up alone in this foreign place. And so he pursues his own private quest, tracing his family's history to a Mexican ghost town, where, a hundred years earlier, young Cornish miners toiled to the death. With vivid sympathy, Desai conjures the struggles of Eric's grandparents and their community.
Now, in place of the Cornish workers, the native Huichol Indians suffer the cruelty of the mines. When he inquires into their lives, Eric provokes the ire of their self-appointed savior, Dona Vera. Known as the "Queen of the Sierra," Dona Vera is the widow of a mining baron who has dedicated her fortune to preserving the Huichol culture. But her formidable presence belies a dubious past.
The zigzag paths of these characters converge on the Day of the Dead, bringing together past and present in a moment of powerful epiphany. Haunting and atmospheric, with splashes of exuberant color and darker violence, The Zigzag Way is a magical novel of elegiac beauty.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #1169997 in Books
- Published on: 2004-11-09
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Hardcover
- 176 pages
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Like the recent film Lost in Translation, Desai's new novel tells of an American adrift in a foreign culture that remains frustratingly inscrutable. Eric is a New England–born graduate student in history at Harvard who follows his scientist girlfriend, Em, on a research trip to Mexico. Once she sets off with her colleagues to conduct field observations, he is left alone and overwhelmed by his own lack of purpose. Remembering that his Cornish grandfather, about whom he knows next to nothing, had worked as a miner in the Sierra Madre in the early part of the 20th century, he determines he will use the trip to find out more about his family's past. Along the way he meets an eccentric, powerful European woman, Doña Vera, who has become a champion of indigenous culture but whose own past is mysterious. The stories of Eric, his grandparents and Doña Vera are interwoven into a short, contemplative narrative. Eric is a passive narrator, clambering his way through the beautiful but beguiling scenery, which is described in florid, dense prose reflecting his sensory overload, in a story that never really gains momentum. While Desai has uncovered a compelling chapter in Mexican history, the novel is a meandering, disappointing journey.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Bookmarks Magazine
Desai invokes her renowned lush, and occasionally dense, prose to portray Eric’s sensory overload here. She obviously speaks with intimate knowledge of the land, and this, combined with the wealth of historical detail, prompt several critics to sing her praises. More importantly, as The New York Times notes, The Zigzag Way is "not just a condensed course in 20th-century Mexican history but a meditation on the futility of our efforts to outrun the past." In other words, Desai does her job. Eric is a bit too passive as a narrator, and the slim novel does skip deep character development, but what’s here is very good.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
From Booklist
Cultural collisions fascinate Desai, a fiction writer of transfixing acuity who has written most often of East Indian immigrants in the U.S and who now, in her fourteenth book, draws on her intimacy with Mexico. Eric, a psychically adrift young American, travels to Mexico after learning, to his surprise, that his father was born there. Open to serendipity and preternaturally receptive to the land and its ghosts, he is drawn to Dona Vera, a gold digger with a secret European past who has set herself up on a remote estate as an expert on the Huichol Indians and their sacred use of peyote. As Eric resurrects the dramatic, even otherworldly story of his Cornish miner grandfather and intrepid grandmother, Desai, with supreme narrative dexterity and poetic distillation, ponders the forces that allowed marauding foreign tycoons to build silver mines in Mexico worked by demoralized Cornish immigrants and brutalized Indians. Infused with history, compassion, and a sense of wonder, Desai's heightened and affecting novel is ravishing in both its specificity and its universality. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Customer Reviews
Brisk, entertaining, evocative
THE ZIGZAG WAY by Anita Desai is a success in several ways, most notably in delivering to the reader a Mexico of vivid sights, sounds and smells. The feel of the place -- its mountains, animals, flowers, foods -- is captured with a keen eye (and ear, and nose). Secondly, the structure, going back and forth in time and making connections along the way, is irresistible. Where she has not succeeded so well is in creating characters that achieve verisimilitude. The sometimes stilted dialogue doesn't help. And the story itself, for all its exoticism, doesn't rise much beyond the mundane. Still, THE ZIGZAG WAY is a quick, entertaining read worthly of a recommendation, though not an emphatic one.
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.
Mediocre
"The Zigzag Way" is a short book, almost novella size, without a great deal of character development. It does have a shifting cast of characters unified by the willingness to change the familiar for something new, Em being the exception, and also the one character with no real connection to Mexico. At the end the protagonist, unlike his father, still has not found what that something new will be. For a slim book, there was an historical dimension which was valuable, but it almost seems like Desai was also seeking a spiritual experience in Mexico which turned out to be disappointing. The concluding scene has some emotional power, but just doesn't add up to anything really significant. While Desai can create fine metaphors, there were times I felt they were inserted when no metaphor was called for, so that they simply brought attention to themselves. On a personal note, I was better able to visualize Em because I had recently seen the movie "Kinky Boots", and pictured the fiancée.
