Nine types of dislocation

ANITA RAU BADAMI

My Nine Lives:Chapters of a Possible PastBy Ruth Prawer JhabvalaJohn Murray, 277 pages, $34.95Ruth Prawer Jhabvala is the author of a dozen novels and short-story collections, including Heat and Dust, The Householder and Esmond in India, almost all of which deal with themes of displacement or a search for an identity. Born in Germany into a comfortable, middle-class Jewish family, Jhabvala emigrated at the age of 12 to London just before the Second World War. Perhaps it was with this move that her preoccupation with dislocation from the familiar and the sense of alienation that permeates her books first arose. In any event, postwar England, where Jhabvala studied literature, was where she acquired language, or, as she remarks in the apologia to her newest work, My Nine Lives, "words in which to express my world and the ambition to do so."