Journey to Ithaca - Softcover

Desai, Anita

3.19

307 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140258183 ISBN 13: 9780140258189

Publisher: Penguin Books, 1996

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A stirring and profound novel of spiritual quests and emotional exile. Young and in love, Sophie and Matteo share a dissatisfaction with their bourgeois upbringing and a yearning for spiritual fulfillment that brings them, like so many others, to India. But the realities of life on an ashram magnify the lovers’ differences. Pragmatic Sophie is horrified and disillusioned by the poverty and hardships they encounter; Matteo, a dreamer, sees only the purity of ascetic life. Eventually his personal search leads him away from Sophie and toward the Mother, a charismatic guru. In an effort to reclaim Matteo, Sophie embarks on her own journey for the truth about the Mother’s mysterious past. What these three people discover is at the heart of this masterful novel—that wisdom is found in the journey itself, and not at its destination.

“The richest and subtlest of her novels . . . Desai’s ‘truth’ is a peacock’s tail. Long after I closed this beautiful book, I watched the iridescent colors change, and change again.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“As always, Ms. Desai writes with intelligence and power. She has a remarkable eye for substance, the things that give life its texture.”—San Francisco Chronicle

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From the Back Cover:

"A daring, colorful novel almost impossible to absorb in one reading... Anita Desai is a fluent artist, working from one vivid salience to the next. She knows the different lights of India, and she sees everything under the sun."

-- Paul West, The New York Times Book Review

"A triumph... What distinguishes the voice of Anita Desai is the physical intensity of her prose, the range of her capacious intelligence, her unsentimental compassion... Her work is an illumination and a blessing."

-- Pearl K. Bell, The New Republic

"A rich tapestry of the contemporary human condition in an alien environment ... Desai creates images rooted in the external environment that leave indelible imprints on our internal landscapes."

-- Mandira Sen, San Francisco Chronicle

"Powerful...a wonder of exquisitely crafted prose. As she piles detail upon detail, the intensity of India is seamlessly conjured up."

-- Judith Weinraub, Washington Post Book World

"A marvelous writer ... The book is exhilaratingly alive."

-- Esther Harriott, New York Newsday

From the Inside Flap:

novel since the widely praised Baumgartner's Bombay, Anita Desai brilliantly evokes spiritual India in all its endless complexity, and examines the nature of pilgrimage through the aspirations and adventures of three superbly realized characters.

Matteo and Sophie join the 1970s flight of young Europeans to India. Matteo -- Italian, raised in the luscious countryside around Lake Como, restless since childhood -- has been introduced by a tutor to Hermann Hesse's The Journey to the East, and it opens in him a desperate longing. Sophie -- German, practical, worldly -- is willing to follow him to the ends of the earth.

In India, together they visit swamis, gurus, ashrams -- always searching. Matteo is seeking spiritual enlightenment, but for Sophie fulfillment lies in earthly love. And when they meet a holy woman known as the Mother, the differences between them seem to explode.

When we learn the Mother's story, we see it as an earlier version of their own -- the st

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