The Zigzag Way [Paperback] [Jan 01, 2009] ANITA DESAI - Softcover

Eric is a buttoned down boston boy, a misfit in his family of hearty fisher folk. Uncertain he will ever complete the book on immigration he has been funded to write, heimpetuously decides to follow his bossy girlfriend to mexico. There, he is seduced by the pageantry of this colorful new country and its old world charm, and stumbles on an astonishing discovery — his grandfather was one of the cornish miners who worked the local mines more than a hundred years ago, and once had another wife. Soon, eric will find himself abandoning his own tentative future project in search of his family’s other lives. The zigzag way is the story of twentieth century mexico, through civil unrest and personal calamity; of the exploitation of the mexican indians, and their dubious saviors, such as the formidable doñavera, widow of a mining baron, and eric’s own grandmother, a young cornish girl whose grave lies ina hillside cemetery. And in unraveling their dark, often violent, histories on the dí