ROSARITA by Anita Desai

Uncommon as they are, second person narratives have an incomparable tendency to destabilise your reading experience. It’s one thing to be in the mind of a character, or follow a story with the comfort of distance. But to be told that you are experiencing the action and must create its sensory contours for yourself is something else altogether. I still remember how unsettling it was to be, in an almost accusatory sense, the serial killer in Iain Banks’s Complicity.

Here, Anita Desai - one of the great prose stylists of our times - uses the second person to elusive, almost ethereal effect, in her story of a young woman (you) being mistaken (perhaps) for the daughter of an Indian woman who had visited Mexico years ago. Your antagonist is an eccentric old lady, referred to as The Stranger, who follos you around insisting that your mum is her old artist friend. Except your mother never left India. And had no interest in art. Or so you think. What follows is a delicate unpicking of family history, set against the tumultuous partitions of Mexico and India.

A little too airy for me, though I couldn’t help but admire it.

Rosarita by Anita Desai
Picador, 2024
94 pages