SOURCE: "In the Path of the Mother," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4809, June 2, 1995, p. 20.

In the following mixed review of Journey to Ithaca, Annan faults the narrative for being full of "gaps and improbabilities," but praises Desai's sincerity and even-handedness.

Journey to Ithaca is not so much an Odyssey as a quest for an Eastern Holy Grail. Anita Desai sets the Prologue in a garden by Lake Como, where Matteo's young English tutor is introducing him to Eastern mysticism by reading him Hermann Hesse's The Journey to the East. A few years later—it is now 1975—Matteo marries a German girl called Sophie. Both do it to get away from their parents. Matteo is still obsessed with India, so that is where they go, backpacking from one grotty lodging to another, and finally from an austere and unfriendly ashram in a slum to a benign and beautiful...