Rosarita

November 1, 2024
Everything Bonita thought she knew about her past is abruptly thrown into question when an older woman attired in layers of colorful skirts accosts her in El Jardin de San Miguel. Bonita has traveled from India to Mexico to study Spanish and is taken aback by this theatrical woman's insistence that she knew Bonita's mother, Rosarita, when she was Bonita's age and in San Miguel to study painting. Bonita says that's impossible; her mother, Sarita, was not an artist and never went to Mexico. But flashbacks to mysterious moments in her childhood prod Bonita into accompanying the stranger she dubs the Trickster on a journey allegedly retracing her mother's footsteps. Shortlisted thrice for the Booker, Desai is exceptionally attuned to the power of suggestion, tug of secrets, mutability of memories, and the anguish of women denied lives of their choosing. Her profound sense of place yields exquisitely rendered scenes saturated with the land's bloody past and the traumas families inherit. As Bonita's quest leads her to the sea, Desai leaves us stunned by nature's glory and humanity's capacity for horror and joy, loneliness and love.

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November 11, 2024
In this provocative if underdeveloped offering from Desai (Fasting, Feasting), an Indian woman studying Spanish in Mexico learns her late mother took a similar path many years earlier. While on a park bench in San Miguel de Allende, Bonita is approached by an older woman named Victoria, who calls her an “Oriental bird” and says she looks just like her mother, Rosarita. Bonita initially disbelieves Victoria when she claims Rosarita came to San Miguel many years ago to study art, and that Victoria met her in the very same park. Though Bonita knows nothing about her mother’s travel or interest in art, she later remembers a pastel sketch of a woman on a park bench that could have been from San Miguel and considers how her mother might have sacrificed her art to raise a family. Driven to know more, Bonita finds herself running into Victoria again and again (“Could she, like a wizard or a magician, bring your mother to life again even if it is a life you never knew or suspected?” Desai writes). As Bonita follows in Rosarita’s footsteps to Colima and La Manzanilla, intriguing questions are raised, but Desai merely skims the surface of her protagonist’s emotions. This will leave readers wanting more. Agent: Peter Straus, RCW Literary.

December 1, 2024

Desai, a three-time Booker Prize shortlistee and one of India's most important writers, offers a new novel. Bonita, who has left India to study in Mexico, unexpectedly encounters her mother's mysterious past through the figure of a stranger she calls the Trickster. Prepub Alert.

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Starred review from February 1, 2025
Sometimes, other people can see the secrets hidden right before your eyes. Bonita, a young Indian woman studying at a language school in Mexico, has a series of unsettling--but ultimately intriguing--encounters with a stranger she meets in a park. Vicky, a flamboyant older woman prone to festive and traditional Mexican attire, insists that Bonita must be the daughter of her lost friend, "Rosarita," another young Indian woman who had traveled to San Miguel many years before to study art. After initially rebuffing Vicky's claims as outlandish, Bonita embarks on a series of reconnaissance missions, around San Miguel and onwards to Colima and the bay at La Manzanilla, in an effort to discern if there was any truth to Vicky's accounts. Forced to make sense of several shadowy aspects of her now-deceased mother's life story, Bonita comes to refer to Vicky herself as "the Trickster" as her confusion about her mother's past grows. As Bonita reassesses the circumstances of her own earlier life, she comes to view some details through a more critical lens: Who was the artist behind the sketch hanging unremarked upon on the wall of her childhood bedroom, for example? Desai's subtle exploration of memory, identity, and thwarted aspirations has a ghostly, haunted quality to it (and veers into gothic territory during a visit to Vicky's ancestral home). This atmospheric and eerie novella is delivered in the second-person voice, adding to the sense of distance between Bonita and the truth and to an ambivalence about the identity of the coolly detached narrator. Desai honors the parallels between art inspired by the Mexican Revolution and the Indian Partition in this tantalizing story of Bonita's attempt to reconcile layer upon layer of a family's history. A haunting meditation on identity and understanding.

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