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Anita Desai’s novel A Fire on the Mountain is now published by Einaudi, translated by Anna Nadotti, with the title Fuoco sulla montagna. In the words of Silvia Albertazzi: “The European reader, familiar with English-language Indian authors such as Ghosh, Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Chandra may find Anita Desai’s reserve somewhat disconcerting. Her work ranges from stories of a woman’s suffering, particularly in the context of marriage, to writing that increasingly focuses on women who manage to give meaning to their lives without help from men, who revive historical memory, seek a new birth, a purification, finally reinventing language through confrontation with the male protagonists, taking a stand in the debate against patriarchal power, telling the human story, so that it is not just a narrative about Indian women, but the narrative of an Indian woman.”
Anita Desai’s spare, refined style in A Fire on the Mountain portrays a different India, glittering and contradictory, a feminine India, freed at last from the overused images of saintly gurus or resigned multitudes of outcasts.

Anna Nadotti
is a translator, essayist and editorial consultant. She has prepared the Italian editions of the works of Anita Desai, Antonia S. Byatt and Amitav Ghosh, among others. She is on the editorial board of the «Indice dei libri», and collaborates with “Il Manifesto” and the Scuola Holden of Turin.