[In the following review, Parameswaran praises the complexity of the human relationships in Journey to Ithaca but finds their resolutions “too simplistic.”]

Over a span of two decades and ten novels, Anita Desai has built up a solid repertoire and a reputation for sensitive insights into human behavior and finesse of language appropriate for expressing them. Journey to Ithaca is a story of the European “flower children” of the 1960s and 1970s who flocked to India and Nepal in search of a kind of spirituality that their lives seemed to lack. Armed with idealism, they reached out to the gold at the end of the rainbow. But their journey took them through the phase of substance abuse—as we now euphemistically call it—and many never came out of that phase. A few went on to find a “guru,” and some wrote songs that set their generation ablaze with another wave of idealism that was more often than not as misplaced as the first beatnik wave.

Journey to Ithaca is the story of a young Italian, Matteo, who leaves his aristocratic European home, armed with Hesse's Journey to the East and ideals of free love and free spirit, fed by his English tutor. His equally ideal-inspired wife Sophie comes to a point when she wants to settle down with their children to a more traditional life, but Matteo has found his mission: service at the ashram of the Mother an enigmatic and charismatic woman who runs the ashram on the precept that hard work is the way to salvation.

The story so far is rather stereotypical: the much-inflated spirituality of India, and its equally inflated dirt and filth and promiscuity, all encapsulated in the final night that Sophie spends in Bombay when a businessman breathes filthy innuendoes down her neck. But then in the second half Desai has Sophie embark on her own journey of discovery, unearthing the life story of the Mother. Without divulging details of this part of the novel, one can say that the narrative takes on a journalistic slant and gallops on to fill in the blanks of the Mother's past: the 1920s in Cairo, stays in European capitals, then on to India.

To say I was disappointed without giving my reasons would be unfair to the author. But a review must be more than a blurb for the book being reviewed, though its length precludes analysis. The disappointment comes from the narrative's being too pat, too easy in its resolutions. There are very complex human relationships, but their resolutions are too simplistic. For example, Krishna, the dancer who gives Sophie the Mother's diary, is an abridged version of the self-centered poet of In Custody, and he parts with the diary too easily. There are philosophical questions being posited, but the answers are too naïve. For example, the Mother, whose prototype can be found in the Mother of Aurobindo Ashram, has a string of philosophical discourses that can be read as just that—a string of flowers, a circle that leads nowhere. But maybe that is the point of it all—typical of Desai's acerbic distancing of herself, much like Sophie—from answers to spiritual and artistic questions. The title makes clear this stance: the Ithaca of C. P. Cavafy (whose lines are used as epigraph) and of Tennyson's “Ulysses,” which affirm that the journey is more important than the origin or destination.