SOURCE: "Life on the Periphery," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4450, July 15-21, 1988, p. 787.

In the review below, Chew discusses the themes in Baumgartner's Bombay.

Now that Baumgartner's Bombay has appeared, it seems it was inevitable that Anita Desai should have sought, at some point in her career, to draw together in explicit ways the two strands of her heritage, Indian on her father's side, German on her mother's. In this latest novel, she also takes up again a subject that has strong claims on her imagination: the role of the outsider, whether it is a person marginalized by society, or one who opts to live life on the periphery.

Hugo Baumgartner, moreover, is doubly exiled—a Jew who fled Nazi persecution to work and then settle in India, he is permanently estranged from Germany and yet can never be anything other than a foreigner in his adopted...