For some reason getting through this was a real slog, and I only started getting into this right near the end. A very slim novel, at about 180 pages, took me 10 days! I suspect it's more to do with my current knackered-ness, than the actual book, as it's beautifully written. Even with the slogging, I managed to glean a couple of things out of the novel, but am left feeling like I've missed the point. Or maybe that is the point? (view spoiler)[With Eric searching for something, Dona Vera running away from and Betty running towards, and all of their displacement, perhaps I've hit the point on the head - who knows!I do definitely think this deserves another read at another stage when I can give it the time and consideration I think it deserves.p11: It would creep across her face whenever she came back from a long day at the lab and found him at home, in Boston, listening to Mozart or to Schumann, with the cat Shakespeare ensconced on his lap and his book held slightly to the side.13: They seemed already to have arrived at a stage that many couples require 30 years to achieve, although both were still graduate students and had not spoken once of marriage; there was often an atmosphere of self-congratulation hovering over these perfect occasions.19: Em, scrubbing and polishing furiously with her dish towel, tried to make satisfying answers while attempting to comprehend a mind so free of resentment or envy, so buoyant with curiousity and quest.26: How foolish to think he could join the company of the sure and the certain, those who knew what to do with themselves from morning to night every day of the year and everywhere. Had he not always been the misfit? It was his role; she knew it.- He defines himself very much by Em and other women. Always considering what Em would think or say about what he is doing.61: After the fall of the Aztec empire, the conquest of the country proceeded with wonderful rapidity, chiefly because the invaders hoped to meet with greater treasure in every mountain they beheld. The manner in which the Indian was forced to labour in the mines is well known, and how, accustomed to the gentler pursuit of agriculture, their numbers rapidly diminished.Carl Sartorius, Mexico and the Mexicans, 1859.69: She knew she would have to be strong to live here. She had to kill scorpions daily in the ruins of the house before it was repaired, and sometimes the silence was so intense that she could hear the termites' tiny jaws gnawing at the beams above her while sawdust rained down on the furniture, and the floor, her bed, her hair.93: Neither English nor Spanish, both spoken languages to her, not literary ones. The only one she could write with any ease was one she would never use: she had crushed it out of herself. No tracks, no tracks.The mystery of Dona Vera is never solved properly. This also explains her insecurity and her need to be constantly reaffirmed.97: He remembered Em's words to him, that he would, once he was alone, discover things he could not when he was with her. He had not believed her, but they seemed now to have the ring of truth.154: It was the only time Davey Rowse was known to have spoken to anyone of the mines in Mexico where he had once worked, and it was in his grandson Eric's head that he buried a flake of golden nonsense that he had once found in Mexico's mountains.165: There were not large family gatherings around every grave; some had only one person alone come to clear the place of a year's worth of weeds, discard the offerings of the year before and fill a rusted tin can with fresh flowers. Some graves had no one at all attending them, and other visitors to the cemetery, out of pity, left a few marigolds or a stalk of amaranth so the dead would not feel forgotten or excluded. By including them, their families seemed to be filling in whatever empty spaces there might be.168: "Puto," she cursed - but almost fondly. (hide spoiler)]
Eric and Emily, he calls her Em' for short, live in a cozy Boston apartment, cozily pursuing their postgraduate work. Emily is a scientist. Eric is working on a dissertation on immigration patterns in the US. But Eric is not fulfilled by his research. He would rather sit and drink coffee and watch the world pass him by. He is tempted to throw his dissertation away. Emily is not particularly pleased with Eric's growing lassitude. It contrasts sharply with her immersion in her subject. A point of crisis appears in their relationship when Em announces that she must go on an extended field trip to the jungles of the Yucatan to pursue her research. Eric is at a loss, but latches on to Emily's upcoming trip as a means to escape his doldrums. When they get to Mexico City, Eric is told he cannot follow Em into the jungle and must devise his own purpose for the visit. He is suddenly impelled to visit the part of Mexico where his father was born. His father is the son of a Welsh miner who was imported into Mexico in the early part of the Twentieth Century to work as a part of a colony of Welshmen. Eric decides his trek, in anticipation of an undefined novel he intends to write, will be to go where his father was born and that he will find his inspiration there. The novella follows Eric on his wanderings as he makes his way to the remote mining town where his grandfather once worked. Em has told him that he will discover much more about himself while he is alone than he would with her and she is right. He is witness to the clash of cultures and the pomposity of an ancient, wealthy, European woman who has made saving the local Indian tribe from the ravages of the mining industry her life's work. But it is when he arrives at the dusty, primitive town where his grandfather once lived that he truly comes to terms with himself. He discovers a world of mystery and magic that could not be a greater contrast to the finite, focused world that Emily inhabits. The novella is slender yet full of Ms. Desai's mellifluous prose. She describes a world where magic and realism meet. The novel's title comes from the zigzagged routes that the Indian miners during the Spanish conquest used to make when they carried ore uphill from deep in the mines. Eric's zigzagged course brings him too into the light carrying, perhaps, a treasure just as precious of that of the Indian miners, self knowledge.
What do You think about The Zigzag Way (2006)?
Certain fiction set in Mexico – Night of the Iguana, Touch of Evil, novels whose titles I’ve lost - seems to remind me of Under the Volcano, which I read when I was about 12 and read again as an adult and found the same sort of bleak enchantment. The Zigzag Way evoked that kind of understated – even unstated – spiritual landscape that strongly affects the personnel of the story (and me). Like those spare folksongs we resurrected in the ‘60s, there’s more than meets the ear and the eye, and it’s all the more intriguing and somehow satisfying than a detailed explanation would be.
—Kathy Petersen
This feels more like a novella to me. The themes are overt: grad student stalled on his thesis about immigration patterns follows his driven scientist girlfriend on her field work, where he ends up trying to trace his own English family's migration from Cornwall to Mexico to work in the silver mines that boomed before the Mexican Revolution, and comes to a place where his perspective may be radically altered. However, Desai's writing is gorgeous, and her thinking about the themes she makes obvious is far subtler than a superficial look at the narrative would indicate. Her primary narrator, Eric, seems to function as a sort of straight-man, the fall-guy for the things being felt and lived by the incredibly strong women that surround him, both in his past and in his present. He's academically aware of, and simultaneously at the mercy of, all of the enlightened-traveler mystique that surrounds American travel in other countries. This novel(la) would be entirely too neat, however, if Eric found what he was ultimately looking for, as nebulously defined as it is; The Zigzag Way's ultimate triumph is in providing an ambiguous and narratively unsatisfying ending, in which Eric's foremother is left to her losses and Eric may never truly grasp the enormity of the individual tragedies that lie just beneath the notice of his scholar's wide eye.
—Sierra
Like Fasting, Feasting not fantastic writing, but a well-woven story that feeds itself life and intimacy with the very interesting characters. That weaving of the story lines was the author's artistry that I was most impressed with. The story is of a young man who is flailing a bit post his graduate work. He is in a relationship, and if there is one gap in the story it was not clear to me at why these two are together! So while the story portrays them as a solid couple, I didn't feel it. His girlfriend goes to Mexico to do some of her research, and he tags along. Kind of for something to do, but more driven than that, he starts exploring his family history in the area that he knows very little about. I felt the book was rich with Mexican culture from the outside/ex-patriot point of view, including through some relatively recent history. I loved the portrayal of the Day of the Dead festivities at the end.
—Jody
