Kirjahaku

'Strategic thinking for a writer articulates itself as dislike and as allegiance.' In this wonderfully rich and diverse collection of essays, Amit Chaudhuri explores the way in which writers understand and promote their own work in antithesis to writers and movements that have gone before. Chaudhuri's criticism disproves and questions several assumptions—that a serious and original artist cannot think critically in a way that matters; that criticism can't be imaginative, and creative work contain radical argumentation; that a writer reflecting on their own position and practice cannot be more than a testimony of their work, but open up how we think of literary history and reading. Illuminating new ways of thinking about Western and non-Western traditions, prejudices, and preconceptions, Chaudhuri shows us again that he takes nothing as a given: literary tradition, the prevalent definitions of writing and culture; and the way the market determines the way culture and language express themselves. He asks us to look again at what we mean by the modern, and how it might be possible to think of the literary today.

In 1980s Bombay, a highly regarded voice teacher and his affluent sixteen-year-old student enter into a relationship that will have unexpected and lasting consequences in their lives, and the lives of their families. With exquisitely sensuous detail, quiet humor, and unsentimental poignancy, Amit Chaudhuri paints a luminous portrait of the spiritual and emotional force behind a revered Indian tradition; of two fundamentally different but intricately intertwined families; and of a society choosing between the old and the new.

In this vividly drawn and deeply personal portrait, acclaimed novelist Amit Chaudhuri chronicles the two years he spent revisiting Calcutta, the city of his birth. A mesmerizing narrative, the book takes readers into the heart of a metropolis relatively resistant to the currents of globalization. Moving through the city's vibrant avenues and derelict alleyways, Chaudhuri introduces us to the homeless and the high society, describes its architecture and food, its sounds and smells, and its past and present politics. With rare candor and clarity, he combines memoir, reportage, and history to evoke all that is most particular and extraordinary about the city--and to explain his own passionate attachment to the place and its people.

Amit Chaudhuri’s stories range across the astonishing face of the modern Indian subcontinent. From a divorcé about to enter into an arranged marriage to a teenaged poet who develops a relationship with a lonely widower, from singing teachers to housewives to white-collar businessmen, Chaudhuri deftly explores the juxtaposition of the old and new worlds in his native India. Here are stories as sweet and humane as they are incisive and revealing. ‘Brilliant . . . Here, as with Chekhov or Hemingway, the reader not only accepts but relishes the economy, because he or she has already been won over by other deft and graceful aspects of the author’s style . . . Against these vivid backgrounds are placed an astonishingly varied galaxy of characters . . . A civilised, not to mention an immensely pleasurable read’ Ranjit Bolt, Guardian ‘Few write as delicately as Chaudhuri, whose characters intertwine their antennae and talk in elliptical low tones, displaying all the while their peculiarly Indian humanity’ Philip Glazebrook, Spectator ‘Mr Chaudhuri limns the trajectory of an entire life in a handful of pages . . . The stories in this volume combine the folk-art charm and easygoing improvisations of R. K. Narayan with the compassion and evocative atmosphere of Chekhov’ Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

**SHORTLISTED FOR THE JAMES TAIT BLACK PRIZE**By turns essay, memoir and cultural study, Finding the Raga is Amit Chaudhuri's singular account of his discovery of, and enduring passion for, North Indian music: an ancient, evolving tradition whose principles and practices will alter the reader's notion of what music might - and can - be.Tracing the music's development, Finding the Raga dwells on its most distinctive and mysterious characteristics: its extraordinary approach to time, language and silence; its embrace of confoundment, and its ethos of evocation over representation. The result is a strange gift of a book, for musicians and music lovers, and for any creative mind in search of diverse and transforming inspiration.'Supple, intricate and uncompromising, full of delicate observation and insight, Amit Chaudhuri's Finding the Raga immerses us in the rigorous beauty and cosmology of Indian classical music. It is also a loving memoir about relationships and places, dedication and vocation.' Geoff Dyer

**WINNER OF THE JAMES TAIT BLACK PRIZE**'A splendid book.' Literary Review'A modern masterpiece.' New York Journal of BooksFinding the Raga is Amit Chaudhuri's revelatory exploration of North Indian classical music: an ancient, evolving tradition whose principles and practises will alter the reader's notion of what music might - and can - be. Through essay, memoir and cultural study, Chaudhuri dwells on the music's most distinctive and mysterious characteristics, resulting in a gift of a book for musicians and music lovers, and for any creative mind in search of diverse and transforming inspiration. 'Supple, intricate and uncompromising, full of delicate observation and insight.' Geoff Dyer'[A] compelling meditation on Indian and Western art-making.' The New Yorker

In Friend of My Youth, a novelist named Amit Chaudhuri visits his childhood home of Bombay. The city, reeling from the impact of the 2008 terrorist attacks, weighs heavily on Amit's mind, as does the unexpected absence of his childhood friend Ramu, a drifting, opaque figure who is Amit's last remaining connection to the city he once called home.

'A mysterious, subtle, haunting novel.'Chris PowerAn unnamed man arrives in Berlin as a visiting professor. It is a place fused with Western history and cultural fracture lines. He moves along its streets and pavements; through its department stores, museums and restaurants. He befriends Faqrul, an enigmatic exiled poet, and Birgit, a woman with whom he shares the vagaries of attraction. He tries to understand his white-haired cleaner. Berlin is a riddle-he becomes lost not only in the city but in its legacy.Sealed off in his own solitude, and as his visiting professorship passes, the narrator awaits transformation and meaning. Ultimately, he starts to understand that the less sure he becomes of his place in the moment, the more he knows his way.'Chaudhuri has already proved that he can write better than just about anybody of his generation.' Jonathan Coe

Winner of the Encore Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for FictionA beguiling, short and yet sweeping prose-poem, Afternoon Raag is the account of a young Bengali man studying at Oxford University and caught in complicated love triangle. His loneliness and melancholy sharpen his memories of home, which come back to haunt him in vivid, sensory detail.Intensely moving, superbly written, Afternoon Raag is a testimony to the clash of the old and the new; arrivals and departures.With an introduction by James Wood

Abhi, a Bengali boy, spends his school holidays at his uncle's home in Calcutta, trying to make sense of the often confusing world of adults around him. Heatwaves, thunderstorms, mealtimes, prayer-sessions, shopping expeditions and family visits create the shifting tectonic plates that will eventually shape the family's life.Delicate, nuanced, full of exquisite detail, A Strange and Sublime Address is also a paean to the city, with nine short stories that illustrate the world of Amit Chaudhuri's imagination.With a foreword by Colm Tóibín

'Delightfully witty . . . Luminously intelligent . . . Odysseus Abroad has placed itself, with erudition and playfulness, on the map of modernism.' Guardian1985: twenty-two year old Ananda is a student adrift in Thatcher's Britain, homesick and isolated. His eccentric 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, Odysseus Abroad follows the two isolated men on one of their weekly forays, gradually revealing the background to the two men's lives with deft precision and humour as they traverse London together, circling around their respective pasts and futures, and finding in one another an unspoken solace.

Khuku, a housewife, is irritated with the Muslims because their call to prayer wakes her up early every morning; her husband, a retired businessman, has been hired to cure a 'sick' sweet factory that doesn't particularly want to be cured. Across town, Khuku's brother worries about his son's affiliations with the Communist Party, but only because they may affect his ever-so-gradually coalescing marriage prospects.Freedom Song is a work of fiction that plays with big ideas while evoking the smallest aspects of everyday life with acute tenderness and extraordinary beauty.

A year after his divorce, Jayojit Chatterjee, an economics professor in the American Midwest, travels home to Calcutta with his young son, Bonny, to spend the summer holidays with his parents. Jayojit is no more accustomed to spending time alone with Bonny - who lives with his mother in California - than he is with the Admiral and his wife, whose daily rhythms have become so synchronized as to become completely foreign to their son.Together, the unlikely foursome struggles to pass the protracted hours of summer, each in his or her own way mourning Jayojit's failed marriage. Written with depth and tenderness, A New World goes right to the heart of a family, making vividly alive their hopes, desires and regrets.

Set across Bombay and Calcutta, Amit Chaudhuri's stories range from a divorcee about to enter into an arranged marriage to a teengaed poet who develops a relationship with a lonely widower, from a singing teacher struggling to make a living out of the boredom of his students to gauche teenager desperate to hurdle past his adolescence.Rich with subtlety, elegance and deep feeling, Real Time is classic Chaudhuri.

**Includes a new foreword by Pankaj Mishra**Bombay in the 1980s: Shyam Lal is a highly regarded voice teacher, trained in the classical idiom but happily teaching more popular songs to well-to-do women, whose modern way of life he covets. Sixteen-year-old Nirmalya Sengupta is the rebellious scion of an affluent family who wants only to study Indian classical music. With a little push from her mother, Shyam agrees to accept Nirmalya as his student, entering into a relationship that will have unexpected and lasting consequences.With quiet humor and unsentimental poignancy, The Immortals is a luminous portrait of the spiritual and emotional force of a revered Indian tradition, of two fundamentally different but intricately intertwined families, and of a society choosing between the old and the new.

In Odysseus Abroad, Amit Chaudhuri charts a day in the life of two Indian men--a twenty-two-year-old student trying (and failing) at being a poet and his bachelor uncle, who has been living in genteel poverty for nearly three decades--as they explore London, the city they now call home. A wistful and beguiling work of fiction, the novel follows nephew and uncle on one of their weekly forays about town, as they ruminate on their situations, the art of living, and each other. Marked by the same sensual richness that is a hallmark of all of Chaudhuri's work, here is a charming yet candid look at the experiences of the outsider, the struggles of youth and loneliness, and the spiky, needful, sometimes comical, yet ultimately loving connection between two generations.

Winner of the James Tait Black Prize for Biography An autobiographical exploration of the role and meaning of music in our world by one of India's greatest living authors, himself a vocalist and performer. Amit Chaudhuri, novelist, critic, and essayist, is also a musician, trained in the Indian classical vocal tradition but equally fluent as a guitarist and singer in the American folk music style, who has recorded his experimental compositions extensively and performed around the world. A turning point in his life took place when, as a lonely teenager living in a high-rise in Bombay, far from his family's native Calcutta, he began, contrary to all his prior inclinations, to study Indian classical music. Finding the Raga chronicles that transformation and how it has continued to affect and transform not only how Chaudhuri listens to and makes music but how he listens to and thinks about the world at large. Offering a highly personal introduction to Indian music, the book is also a meditation on the differences between Indian and Western music and art-making as well as the ways they converge in a modernism that Chaudhuri reframes not as a twentieth-century Western art movement but as a fundamental mode of aesthetic response, at once immemorial and extraterritorial. Finding the Raga combines memoir, practical and cultural criticism, and philosophical reflection with the same individuality and flair that Chaudhuri demonstrates throughout a uniquely wide-ranging, challenging, and enthralling body of work.

Meditations on city life in Mumbai, Calcutta, and the United Kingdom as well as elegies for the dead populate this original collection. Amit Chaudhuri, one of the most exploratory writers of English-language fiction, has also written and published poetry throughout his career as a novelist, poetry that shares many of the concerns of his prose while sounding a distinct and memorable note of its own. This book collects the greater portion of that work for the first time, starting with St Cyril Road, named after a street in Bandra, a suburb of Bombay to which Chaudhuri's parents moved in the early eighties. On visits to them from the UK, where he was studying, Chaudhuri found his attention drawn to the minutiae of streets and balcony-level sightings with a sense of everyday discovery that he then brought to his poems. In subsequent years he largely abandoned poetry, until a visit in 2018 to North Calcutta to photograph the interiors of sweet shops led to a new volume, Sweet Shop. If St Cyril Road is about being and looking, Sweet Shop is about the taste of living. It was followed by the poems in Ramanujan (named after the great mathematician), which trace the way Chaudhuri's life has been intertwined with various cities, as well as poems that serve as elegies for his parents. This collection also has the essay "Interlude," about Chaudhuri's parents' move to Bandra and his beginnings as a poet, a selection of songs, and some unpublished new poems.

In this haunting and noirish novel by a leading author and critic, an Indian writer travels to Berlin and soon finds himself slipping into a fragmented, fuguelike state. An Indian writer has come to Berlin as a visiting professor. This is his second sojourn in the city, which seems strange, and also strangely familiar, to him. He is disoriented by its names, its immensity, and its history; he is worried that something may happen to him there. Faqrul, a friendly Bangladeshi poet living in exile, takes him up--then disappears. The visiting writer is increasingly adrift in a city that not long ago was two cities, each cut off from the other, much as the new unified city is cut off from the divided one of the past. It is the fall of 2005; every day it grows colder. The visitor is beginning to feel his middle age. To him, the new world of the twenty-first century, with its endless commodities from all over the place and no prospect of any sort of historical transformation, appears to exist in a state of amnesiac suspense. He gets involved with a woman, Birgit. He begins to miss his classes. He blacks out in the street. People are worried. "I've lost my bearings--not in the city; in its history," he thinks. "The less sure I become of it, the more I know my way." But does he? Amit Chaudhuri's Sojourn is a dramatic and disconcerting work of fiction, a book about the present as it slips into the past, a picture of a city and of a troubled mind, a historical novel about an ostensibly post-historical time, a story of haunting. Here, as in his earlier work, Chaudhuri pries open fictional form to explore questions of public and private life in ways that are both bold and subtle.

Winner of the UK's Encore Award for best second novel, a lyrical story of a Bengali student at Oxford University who is caught in the complications of a love triangle. Afternoon Raag is a book of branching and overlapping stories, a book that like memory moves unpredictably in time. In it, a nameless first-person narrator looks back at his student days in Oxford, a period of loneliness and discovery when his affections were torn between two women, and to the summer vacations that took him from England to Bombay, where his parents lived, and later to Calcutta, where he was born. Descriptions of Oxford's green lawns and drab dorms, of friends and classes and the relentless drizzle, sit beside Bombay street scenes and recollections of the teacher, now dead, from whom the narrator and his mother learned music.Afternoon Raag is a book about the uncertainty of youth and the strange inevitability of growing up. Its images are wonderfully vivid; its rhythms elastic and entrancing. Throughout it is haunted by the spirit of the music teacher, the master singer who gives shape to the elusive and annihilating passage of time.