Customer Reviews

The Zigzag Way

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

This book reads more like a tourist guide than a novel. It seems as if the author has visited Mexico and wants to record her reactions to it rather than create artistically structured fiction. Characters are unconvincing, sentences are long and unstructured, and the narrative style shows little skill. A forgetable novel.

"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.

Eric O'Brien is an uncertain and awkward young man, a would-be writer and a traveller in spite of himself. Happy to follow his more confident girlfriend Em to Mexico, he is overwhelmed with sensory overload and gradually seduced by the strangeness, the colour, the mysteries of an older world and its celebrations of the Dia de los Muertos. He finds himself in a curious quest for his own family in a ghost mining town, now barely inhabited, where almost a hundred years earlier young Cornish miners worked the rich seams in the earth. Until Pancho Villa and revolution came to Mexico.

A recording of this novel is available from BBC Audiobooks and Eleanor Bron's reading is truly breathtaking. Highly recommended.

Interesting topic. Fantastic setting, but the author didn't seem to do anything with the picture she painted. I picked up the book while living abroad in Mexico and had just finished a trip to the high desert country where this novel takes place. While Anita Desai painted the picture of where I was, I lacked the convincing plot and story to the novel to keep me entertained. I finished the novel, but not because it was a page-turner.

Eric and Emily, he calls her Em' for short, live in a cozy Boston apartment, cozily pursuing their postgraduate work. Emily is a scientist. Eric is working on a dissertation on immigration patterns in the US. But Eric is not fulfilled by his research. He would rather sit and drink coffee and watch the world pass him by. He is tempted to throw his dissertation away.

Emily is not particularly pleased with Eric's growing lassitude. It contrasts sharply with her immersion in her subject. A point of crisis appears in their relationship when Em announces that she must go on an extended field trip to the jungles of the Yucatan to pursue her research. Eric is at a loss, but latches on to Emily's upcoming trip as a means to escape his doldrums. When they get to Mexico City, Eric is told he cannot follow Em into the jungle and must devise his own purpose for the visit. He is suddenly impelled to visit the part of Mexico where his father was born. His father is the son of a Welsh miner who was imported into Mexico in the early part of the Twentieth Century to work as a part of a colony of Welshmen. Eric decides his trek, in anticipation of an undefined novel he intends to write, will be to go where his father was born and that he will find his inspiration there.

The novella follows Eric on his wanderings as he makes his way to the remote mining town where his grandfather once worked. Em has told him that he will discover much more about himself while he is alone than he would with her and she is right. He is witness to the clash of cultures and the pomposity of an ancient, wealthy, European woman who has made saving the local Indian tribe from the ravages of the mining industry her life's work.

But it is when he arrives at the dusty, primitive town where his grandfather once lived that he truly comes to terms with himself. He discovers a world of mystery and magic that could not be a greater contrast to the finite, focused world that Emily inhabits.

The novella is slender yet full of Ms. Desai's mellifluous prose. She describes a world where magic and realism meet. The novel's title comes from the zigzagged routes that the Indian miners during the Spanish conquest used to make when they carried ore uphill from deep in the mines. Eric's zigzagged course brings him too into the light carrying, perhaps, a treasure just as precious of that of the Indian miners, self knowledge.

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.

Eric is drifting in his chosen career path, writing a book on immigration with the help of a grant, an extension of his thesis, daily losing focus, caught up in an aimless cycle of wasted days. His highly motivated girlfriend is another matter, focused and engaged in her own work, soon to travel to Yucatan for extensive research with her fellow scientists. Clinging to the relationship and his angst, an ambivalent Eric grabs the opportunity to travel to Mexico with Emily, certain that a change of scene will invigorate his sagging self-discipline and commitment to his project. When they arrive in Mexico, Eric is stunned by the color and beauty of the area, the unflinching brightness of the days a sharp contrast to his native Boston. With Emily soon to leave for the interior, Eric walks the streets of the city, drinking up local culture and attending lectures he cannot understand with his limited knowledge of Spanish.

Yet in one lecture the names of places stimulate his unconscious, releasing barely remembered stories told in his childhood in Cornwall, England, tales of mining in exotic places, of hardship, revolution and loss. With little to go on but the fragments of his grandfather's tales of life as a miner in Mexico, Eric learns, albeit tangentially, that his familial ties to the region have remained dormant all these years, waiting to be rediscovered in this time, in this place. Left to his own devices, Eric uncovers a legacy that changes his definition of himself and the direction of his life. As the annual celebration of the Day of the Day approaches, Eric struggles with what he has learned in the Sierra Madre and his connection to the enigmatic Dona Vera, the Australian wife of a mining baron, who holds the key to Eric's past.

Desai's prose is evocative, the shy and unobtrusive East Coast scholar contrasted with the brilliant local color and lore of the Sierra Madre, a subtle intimation of darker personal histories buried beneath the veneer of modern civilization, the past powerful in the words of the eccentric widow who speaks the mellifluous names of Eric's memory. Stories buried in stories, the layers of years mute the voices that would tell of brutality and injustice; with Eric as her unwitting vehicle, Desai uncovers a time of turmoil and violence where turn-of-the-century Cornwall meets the harsh world of mining under the impossibly blue skies of Mexico, where sacred peyote grows at the surface of the earth's rich ores, all made real on Dia de los Muertos. Luan Gaines/ 2006.

My reading has declined by 75% this past year for the lack of finding books like this one. I learned more about Mexico in 160 pages than in 4 visits there. The author has an incredible ability to focus with lightning pace on both the thrust of plot and smallest details, but never through use of excess words. We start in an East Coast college where a young guy follows his scientist girl friend to Mexico and as they separate for her to do her work, the young man goes deeper into the mountains of Mexico and almost loses himself in the history he trudges up in the pursuit of the story of his Mexican grandfather. Many readers will say, Oh Yuck! and ignore books like this, turning to another James Petterson re-hash. Too bad, but that's freedom.