3 Review(s)

Hugo Baumgartner is a firangi wherever he goes - too dark for Hitler’s Germany, too fair for India. Escaping the Nazi regime but losing his parents to it, the wandering Jew builds a life in India only to be interrupted by war, and then partition - and finally finds a home in multitudinous Bombay. We meet him as a kindly, rather hapless old man who spends his days making the rounds of local teashops to scavenge for his many cats. Then, one day at the Café du Paris, one of his regular haunts, he encounters a surly young German of the new order - a drug-crazed hippie who will change his life forever. Set in Berlin, Venice, Calcutta - and of course Bombay - Baumgartner’s Bombay is the story of the twentieth century and a memorable portrait of Baumgartner, survivor, victim, everyman. About the Author Anita Desai is one of India’s foremost writers. She has written numerous works of fiction, including Clear Light of Day (1980), In Custody (1984), and Fasting, Feasting (1999)—all shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize—as well as Baumgartner’s Bombay (1988) and The Zigzag Way (2004). In Custody was made into a film by Merchant-Ivory productions, starring Shashi Kapoor and Om Puri. Her most recent work is The Artist of Disappearance (2011). A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in London, the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York, Girton College and Clare Hall at the University of Cambridge, and most recently Sahitya Akademi in India, Anita Desai has also been a Professor of Writing at MIT and has frequently been honoured with awards, among them the Alberto Moravia Prize for Literature and the Padma Shri. Born in Mussoorie to a German mother and a Bengali father, she was educated in Delhi, and currently divides her time between USA and Mexico.