SOURCE: "Exiles," in The New York Review of Books, Vol. XXXVI, No. 9, June 1, 1989, pp. 34, 36.

In the following excerpt, Dinnage comments on the "relentlessly dark" tone of Baumgartner's Bombay, calling it "the most pessimistic, but perhaps the most powerful" of Desai's works.

Anita Desai's Baumgartner's Bombay … deals with expatriation and the distant consequence of genocide;… [the] horror takes place off stage and the central character is a second-generation victim. Desai is half-Indian, half-German; in her books,… many of the characters live with a sense of unease and displacement. Deven, in In Custody, struggles for his literary ideals against small-town academia and an accusing wife; Nanda Kaul in Fire on the Mountain has retreated from all commitments to an isolated hill station; in Clear Light of Day a fragmented family is followed over the years, caught between an Anglicized literary culture and a background of decay and dust and inertia...