THE UNIVERSE IN A STONE

By Paul Gray

Can there be anything more tiresome than hearing--or reading--about someone else's quest for spiritual enlightenment? Such accounts always tend toward the deeply sincere and the totally humorless. Anita Desai is therefore an intrepid novelist indeed; her Journey to Ithaca (Knopf; 312 pages; $23) traces the pilgrimages of not one but three seekers after truth, spelled with a capital T.

Matteo is the son of wealthy Italian parents, Sophie the daughter of equally rich German ones. They meet, marry and set out for India in 1975, Matteo carrying a copy of Hermann Hesse's The Journey to the East with him. The immensity of the country--its beauty and its filth, its holy men and its begging children--initially overwhelms them. And they discover that their reasons for going differ. Sophie is a hedonist, looking to apprehend reality through the senses: "I want to go to Goa and eat shrimp. I want to go to Kashmir and live on a houseboat." Matteo is disgusted: "That isn't India." So Sophie increases her intake of marijuana and gamely follows her husband from swami to swami.

After perceiving the entire universe in a small stone, Matteo suffers something of a nervous breakdown. Looking for a cure, he fetches up at an ashram in the foothills of the Himalayas, run by an elderly woman known to her devotees as the Mother. "We know the Divine Force is everywhere," she tells the faithful. "Bliss! Bliss now, bliss here, forever bliss." This is what Matteo has been waiting to hear. Sophie, now pregnant, is skeptical, but she moves in and bears the first of her two children.

Years pass, and Sophie eventually takes her son and daughter back to Europe to be educated. But when she learns that Matteo is ill, she returns to India and decides to investigate the past life of the Mother. "I will make a connection between what you believe and what I know," she tells her husband. Her research turns up an engaging tale of the feisty young girl, half-French, half-Egyptian, who eventually became the Mother. But this half of Journey to Ithaca does not mesh convincingly with the saga of Sophie and Matteo; it seems less a tale within a tale than a totally discrete narrative. Desai beautifully describes the Indian landscapes, but the people who move through them, especially the three principals, seem so monomaniacal about their journeys that they remain, in the end, inaccessible.