Journey to Ithaca
Journey to Ithaca is a novel written by Anita Desai, published in 1995. The novel takes its name from a poem by Constantine P. Cavafy. The novel describes a pilgrimage to India by a young couple, Italian Matteo and German Sophie and the life of a mysterious woman, Laila who runs the ashram where they live and is known there as "The Mother". The novel further develops a theme that Desai explored in an early short story, Scholar and Gypsy; the difference between the character who feels the world is all we need and the character for whom the world is limited.
Settings
The book's story takes place in many different places on 4 continents including Lago di Garda, Northern India, Bombay, Cairo, Paris, New York and Holyoke MA.Although the exact time frame of the main story is deliberately unclear, it seems to start in the 1960s and take us into the 1970s. Chapter 3 takes place in the 1920s as we follow Laila from her roots in Cairo on her travels to Europe and America. At the time of the framework story Matteo is seriously ill in the hospital in India and each section before chapter 4 starts with Sophie visiting Matteo.
Summary
Prologue
The story of Matteo and Sophie’s children staying with their grandparents at Lago di Garda interweaves with the story of Matteo and his sister growing up there and eventually Matteo and Sophie’s first meeting there at a dinner when she visits with her parents, her father, a German banker who works Matteo’s industrialist father. Matteo is deep under the influence of his German tutor Fabian who introduced him to Herman Hesse and he is longing to travel east on a spiritual quest. In the present, their children Giacomo and Isabel seem lost in the overbearing environment of the grandparents and can’t understand why India where they were both born is a bad place for them.Chapter One
Sophie and Matteo’s initial time in India goes awry when Matteo and their new friends start visiting questionable spiritual teachers and Sophie feels almost immediately alienated from that quest. Some spiritual teacher in Bombay leads them on a horrific pilgrimage where they witness the death of a child which turns her off for good. They enter a dismal ashram in Haridwar where Sophie hates the routine and the miserable life style while Matteo takes it all as punishment. The Indians despise the polluted foreigners. Their cultural arrogance and rejection is a complete disillusionment for Sophie but Matteo absorbs and embodies some of their despicable behavior. Once she gets pregnant she is ostracized by the already hostile community and they leave for another ashram – to Sophie’s dismay – led by the Mother, which accepts families.Chapter Two
As they arrive at the place in the foothills of the Himalayas where the ashram is located, Sophie falls violently ill and is taken to hospital while Matteo enters the ashram alone. Under the care of the refreshingly European Dr Bishop Sophie recovers to bear out her pregnancy but when the baby comes she moves into the family quarters with newborn Giacomo. She lives isolated from the community while Matteo becomes more and more involved eventually working for the Mother, a mysterious older woman who runs the ashram since the Guru’s passing, as her secretary and works with her on publishing the Master’s writing. Having a second child does not make things any better and the children end up with their grandparents, first in Germany then in Italy as Sophie sets out on her quest to find out about the true story of the Mother that has taken control of her husband’s life.Chapter Three
Matteo is still sick in the hospital as Sophie tells him she will set off on her quest to learn about the life of the Mother. It starts in Cairo just after World War I where Laila was born as the unruly child of French Egyptian academics. Eventually her parents sent her off to Paris to live with her aunt in a stuffy bourgeois apartment. She finds solace in the oriental shop of Madame Lacan where she reads and learns about India which has an inexplicable attraction for her. When she finds out there will be a dance troupe visiting performing Krishna Lila, she identifies with Lila and convinces the troupe’s leader Krishna to take her on and train her. The troupe takes her to New York where they live in the uptown apartment of a rich benefactress. But the routine of the shows and the poverty wear her down and she suffers from terrible headaches. One night in Holyoke MA she sneaks away before the performance, travels back to New York but before she can find a job Krishna catches up with her and accepts an offer of free tickets to India to take her home. This entire life journey is traced by Sophie visiting all these places eventually ending alone on the platform of the railway station in Holyoke with no trace of the world Laila knew 45 years ago in sight.Chapter Four
Returning to Bombay Sophie has an address where the old Krishna lived and goes there to find out what happened to Laila once she got to India. She receives a package of writing by Laila which tells the story of Laila’s quest in India and how she came to run the ashram in a gushing stream of narratives and poems that take up most of chapter Four.Epilogue
When Sophie returns to the city where the ashram is Matteo is no longer in the hospital. She goes to the ashram to find out the Mother has died and after intense mourning Matteo has decide to travel up north to a place to find enlightenment. In her conversation with Diya, her only friend at the ashram, Sophie admits that she will probably follow him to go look for him.Back to the Garden in Italy, Giacomo returns to the house to tell Nonno and Nonna that he saw his father, Matteo out there. They quickly dismiss him, wanting him to move on with his life, the less said about his parents the better. Only his sister Isabel believes him and share his secret inner world.