SOURCE: "Where Love Has Flown," in The Spectator, Vol. 274, No. 8708, June 3, 1995, pp. 41-2.

Below, Moore offers a mixed review of Journey to Ithaca, stating that the novel "may not be Anita Desai's best book; but I suspect it will prove her most memorable."

Despite its title, Journey to Ithaca is more about exile than homecoming: fulfilments in this fine work are apt to be ambivalent, possibly illusory. It is the combination of this cool ambivalence with a richly sensuous involvement, balancing immersion and detachment, subtlety and warmth, that is characteristic of Anita Desai's finest work.

These qualities are, perhaps, the legacy of Anita Desai's own inward semi-exile. Her father was an Indian: a Bengali, whose roots lay in East Pakistan, but who, in his own exile, brought up his family in Delhi. Her mother was German: a disturbing inheritance in the war. Anita Desai grew up speaking English...