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In this trio of exquisitely crafted novellas, experience the soaring brilliance and delicate restraint
of one of India’s great writers.
In the opening novella, ‘The Museum of Final Journeys’, a junior Civil Service officer is assigned to a remote
outpost. Bored with his new surroundings, he welcomes the diversion when he is called upon by an old
retainer to help preserve the decaying treasures of one family’s private museum. Tantalizing and nostalgic, this
is an allegory of time and dissolution, and of how the past erodes beauty and the present.
In the second novella, ‘Translator Translated’, a prematurely aged lecturer at a girls’ college chances upon the
opportunity of a lifetime when a self-absorbed publisher commissions her to translate to English a collection of
short stories of an obscure Oriya author. The assignment transforms her humdrum life, but when the author’s
family complains about a translation with which she has taken artistic licence her life unravels.
Finally, in the title novella, set in Mussoorie, the reclusive son of wealthy, neglectful parents has a solipsistic
existence in the remains of a burnt house high on a mountain. The arrival of a venal film crew from Delhi,
making a film about environmental degradation, compels him to withdraw even further into seclusion.
Intense, haunting and evocative, The Artist of Disappearance is a delightful rumination on solitude and human
frailties.ISBN - 9788184002812
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Pages : 176
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