Review of Rosarita by Anita Desai (Scribner/Simon and Schuster, 2024, 96 pages)
Reviewed by Merilyn Simonds
What do you read while living abroad? Do you stay abreast of Canadian culture or do you delve into the local culture, or both? In this post, we revisit San Miguel de Allende, where Merilyn Simonds lives in winter, and where Anita Desai does, too. Both of them in their own way becoming local fixtures.
There is something elevating about reading a book in which you know the place of the story intimately.
“All the benches in the Jardín facing the pink spikes and spires of the Parroquia are already taken by lovers of the morning sun, but you find one set back under the meticulously trimmed and shaped trees you are told are Indian laurels, where you can sit making your way at leisure through the Spanish-language newspapers you have bought from the vendor who spreads out a variety of them on the low wall that surrounds the Jardín.”
—Anita Desai, Rosarita
I have sat in that very garden, stared up at those same pink spires, bought Spanish-language newspapers from the vendor who, sadly, no longer spreads her newspapers on the low wall.
Reading Rosarita, I can almost believe my own life is literature.
I was aware that Anita Desai spent the winters in San Miguel de Allende where I live half the year. I often thought I saw her in the distance, or imagined I would meet her at a gathering of friends. I also knew such imaginings were useless, since Desai has a reputation for reclusiveness, whether earned or not.
Given my love of San Miguel and its eccentricities and my admiration of Desai as a writer, you may be inclined to dismiss my opinion when I say Rosarita is an unforgettable book. It is slim, just under a hundred pages, and the story line is deceptively simple: a daughter discovers by accident that her mother lived a secret life before she was born.
What makes this book remarkable isn’t the story: it’s how the story is told — the richness of the language, the cadence of Mexico’s syncretic culture that Desai captures so perfectly.
Desai tells the story in the second person, a difficult perspective to pull off, but in these pages, the constant “you” draws the reader in. “Your mother never lived in San Miguel, never visited Mexico. You know that — the absurdity of such a suggestion! You could tell this woman a thing or two about her.”
“This woman” is the second character in this Desai’s two-hander. Sometimes called The Stranger or The Trickster, sometimes by her name Victoria, or Vicky, this woman claims she was once a close friend of Rosarita, the mother. Slowly she leaks details of the mother’s hidden life: where she travelled in Mexico, the painters she took up with, the illness that felled her.
The daughter is undone by The Stranger’s revelations. “How could she have come on this adventure without uttering a word to you, to any of her family, then return simply to resume the life she knew? How could it be possible to live parallel lives with no apparent connection? How could she not have left any clue other than the Trickster’s tales, which have led you nowhere?”
Desai is eighty-seven years old. She was born in India and grew up speaking Hindi with neighbours, German with her mother, whom her father met in Berlin, and English at school. She published her first story at the age of nine, in English, which became her “literary language.” In her forties, after raising four children, she left India to teach and to write all over the world. In the late 1990s, she started going to Mexico to escape the Boston winter. In Mexico, she felt immediately at home. “Everything about it was Indian: the dust, the smells, the bougainvillea. The small houses. It was so familiar to me. All of it,” she told The Guardian when Rosarita was published last year. Mexico, she says is “a country that gets me writing, always.”
Rosarita is Desai’s first novel in 20 years, although she has published stories in the interim. I leave this book feeling a deep kinship with this writer who loves Mexico as I do, but more than that, I leave transformed, looking into the faces I love, wondering what secret lives are hidden there.
Merilyn Simonds’ latest book is Walking with Beth: Conversations with my 100-Year-Old Friend, (Random House Canada, September, 2025). Her previous book also focused on an older woman, Louise de Kiriline Lawrence, a self-trained ornithologist and naturalist: Woman, Watching: Louise de Kiriline Lawrence and the Songbirds of Pimisi Bay (ECW Press, 2022). Woman, Watching won the Foreword Indies Editor’s Choice Nonfiction Award. Her 22 book publications include a variety of genres, from personal essay and memoir to literary fiction. Her novel, The Holding (McClelland & Stewart, 2004) was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and her nonfiction novel, The Convict Lover (Macfarlane Walter & Ross, 1996; ECW Press, 2018) was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award in 1996.
Check out Penguin Random House for Merilyn Simonds’s upcoming book promotion events, such as tonight’s conversation with Elizabeth Hay at Perfect Books in Ottawa.
