Issyvoo

Authors Claire Messud

Messud writes with the amused candor of someone who lacks a native’s attachment. (The American-born daughter of a Canadian mother and an Algerian French father, she grew up in Australia and Canada and was educated at Yale and the University of Cambridge.)

Tweet this quote Read the full piece at New York Times Meghan O'Rourke New York Times 2006

Anita Desai

Desai is only a quiet writer if you aren’t properly listening.

Read the full piece at New York Review of Books Claire Messud New York Review of Books 2012
The Artist of Disappearance

Although realistically set in the present or recent past, these fictions have a particular timeless quality—almost an old-fashioned air. India itself is portrayed as a place of decay and confusion, a country that, in its race for the future, has lost sight of its past and of its natural splendor.

Read the full piece at New York Review of Books Claire Messud New York Review of Books 2012
Andrew O'Hagan

There are few writers currently at work who are so genuinely and unfashionably engaged with literature’s big, old questions—aesthetics, ethics, politics, religion, authenticity.

Read the full piece at New York Review of Books Claire Messud New York Review of Books 2007
Be Near Me

O’Hagan’s strategy—his use of David as the unreliable first-person narrator—is all the more successful for the degree of risk involved. With the exception, of course, of his conversations with others, we see David’s world only through his own eyes, willfully blind though they often are.

Read the full piece at New York Review of Books Claire Messud New York Review of Books 2007