Vintage International
4 total works
Freedom Song--which collects three of Chaudhuri's novels--celebrates the rhythms of modern India. A boy's visit with relatives conjures the melancholy comforts of family. An Indian student at an English university contemplates the conflicted relationship between an immigrant and his homeland. And the task of marrying off a "problem" son illuminates the complex community of cultures that is modern Calcutta.
Chaudhuri's novels offer simple plots that unfold into dramas of profound emotional resonance. And in prose that has won Chaudhuri comparisons to the master stylists of this century but that emerges as fiercely his own, Freedom Song announces a young writer of extraordinary gifts.
It’s 1985. Twenty-two-year-old Ananda has been a student in London for two years, practicing at being a poet. He's homesick, thinks of himself as an inveterate outsider, and yet he can't help feeling that there is something romantic about his isolation. His uncle, Radhesh is a magnificent failure and an eccentric virgin who has lived in genteel impoverishment in Hampstead for nearly three decades.
Over the course of one day, we follow Ananda and Radhesh on one of their weekly forays about town. Weaving back and forth in time, Chaudhuri gradually reveals the background to the two men’s lives with deft precision and humour as they walk through London together, circling around their respective pasts and futures, and finding in one another an unspoken solace.
Written in a voice that is tender, wry and unsentimental, -Odysseus Abroad is a lyrical and modern exploration of loneliness and failure – as well as a love letter to Homer and Joyce – by one of our most celebrated writers.
Jayojit, a semi-successful writer, now divorced, has finally retrieved his son Bonny for his summer holidays. They are leaving their home in the American Midwest and going back to Calcutta, to his grandparents, the Admiral and his wife. A New World watches Jayojit and his son as they share the dark, close flat with his parents while the city outside is blanketed in fierce summer heat. Amit Chaudhuri delineates with breathtaking delicacy the details of married lives - of an elderly couple entrenched in the unquestioning roles of their past and of a modern marriage now sharply severed in two.
`He has as much of life in each of his books as many of his contemporaries will capture in a career . . . reading some of these passages, you can be reminded of reading Joyce's Dubliners for the first time, where every sentence can seem a small act of beauty' Tim Adams, Observer
Shyamji has music in his blood, for his father was the acclaimed 'heavenly singer' and guru, Ram Lal. But Shyam Lal is not his father, and knows he never will be. Mallika Sengupta's voice could have made her famous, but being the wife of a successful businessman is a full-time occupation in itself. Mallika's son, Nirmalya, believes in suffering for his art, and for him, all compromise is failure: those with talent should be true to that talent. No matter what.
Written in haunting, melodic prose, The Immortals tells the story -- or stories -- of Shyam, Mallika and Nirmalya: their relationships, their lives, their music. More than that, though, it is also the story of music itself, of music as art, and an exploration of its place in the modern world of money and commerce.
'Among the literary voices from India to have made themselves heard in this country over the past ten years, Amit Chaudhuri's is one of the most immpressive: beautifully balanced, affecting, truthful' Sunday Telegraph