Cry the Peacock - Softcover

Though Anita Desai is an established writer but keeping in mind this one to be her first fictional work, she has brought out the insight of Maya's psyche in an exceptional manner. While reading the work though I felt sympathy with Maya but I felt poor for Gautama who paid with his life for being a worldly and practical man. It's the loneliness of Maya that carries the reader with her andexternalizing her inner thoughts and feelings, Desai has made me shiver while understanding her character ...A good work to read for understanding the feminism of Modern age... --Deepti Yadav Jan 9, 2012

I loved reading Cry the Peacock A Trend-setter in Feminist Writing Anita Desai portrays a hyper- sensitive, and cultured Maya and dives deep into her trapped feminine psyche from childhood to her untimely death as a youth. The protagonist who is a female is the victim of many social and psychological predicaments. With Cry, the Peacock, Anita Desai made her debut as a novelist. In this first novel, there are three sections: a short introduction and conclusion in objective, third-person narrative, and a long subjective middle section narrated by the neurotic heroine, Maya. Desai s protagonists usually possess a neurotic, hypersensitive, artistic sensibility and they are dissatisfied with their routine existence which made them search for a more meaningful life .In Cry, the Peacock, Maya, the neurotic heroine, kills her husband, thereby fulfilling the prophecy of an albino sorcerer. This contains a deep-rooted, philosophical concern also.. From Maya to Matteo, most of Anita s protagonists, have a spiritual orientation reminding us of similar concerns in novels such as E. M. Forster s Howards End (1910) and Virginia Woolf s Between the Acts (1941). In Maya s narrative, the stream of consciousness is employed to chronicle the progressive deterioration of both Maya s relationship with her husband, Gautama, and her own mental poise and sanity. Maya with her sensitiveness and love of beauty suffers the agony in the worst way. the flowers and fruits in the garden, the trees and plants, the sky and the seasons, her pets and other animals everything she takes care of..On the other hand , her husband is insensitive and concerned only with the absolute. The irreconcilability between them is clear. --By Dr.Ratan Bhattacharjee on 1 February 2015

A good, poetic book which evokes feminine fancy and reality with a blend of silky smoothness and coarse roughness. Maya is smooth and silky whereas Gautam is rough and coarse. This book makes you feel, perceive and then act. Anita Desai has a tragic vision of woman's life, and she has combined an intricate and sensitive style of her own with the quintessence of reality. The book explores the turbulent and emotional life of Maya, the character, and 'Maya' the illusion itself. Maya the character bends and breaks whereas illusion stays. --By gladys dsouza

Anita Mazumdar Desai (born 24 June 1937) is an Indian novelist and the Emerita John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As a writer she has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times; she received a Sahitya Academy Award in 1978 for her novel Fire on the Mountain, from the Sahitya Academy, India's National Academy of Letters;[1] she won the British Guardian Prize for The Village by the Sea.[2]Anita Mazumdar was born in Mussoorie, India, to a German mother, Toni Nime, and a Bengali businessman, D. N. Mazumdar.[3] She grew up speaking German at home and Bengali, Urdu, Hindi and English outside the house. However, she did not visit Germany until later in life as an adult. She first learned to read and write in English at school and as a result English became her "literary language".[4] She began to write in English at the age of seven and published her first story at the age of nine.[3] She was a student at Queen Mary's Higher Secondary School in Delhi and received her B.A. in English literature in 1957 from the Miranda House of the University of Delhi. The following year she married Ashvin Desai, the director of a computer software company and author of the book Between Eternities: Ideas on Life and The Cosmos. They have four children, including Booker Prize-winning novelist Kiran Desai. Her children were taken to Thul (near Alibagh) for weekends, where Desai set her novel The Village by the Sea.[3] For that work she won the 1983 Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, a once-in-a-lifetime book award judged by a panel of British children's writers.[2]