Amit Chaudhuri

I was beginning to feel it would be best not to settle down in areas recognisably Parisian, because places recognisably themselves tend to be fictitious. A writer is invited to Paris and finds himself living in an area that bears little resemblance to his idea of the city. With the passing of time, his disquiet translates into a way of seeking and experiencing a truer, more unlikely Paris. Château Rouge takes up residence in that area before floating freely through the city. It takes its time, exploring tangents, diversions, side-streets, creeping into new spaces and remote angles, to open up fresh ground and appraise the city, the experience of travel, otherness - and the novel itself - anew.

A newly divorced professor returns home to Calcutta and contends with his disconnection from his son, his parents, and life itself in this atmospheric, lushly descriptive novel of loss and the difficulty of continuing on in spite of it. 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.

Two families in 1980s Bombay--one making ends meet in the old world of Indian classical music, the other thriving in a booming new world of corporate luxury--intersect in this lyrical novel of art and commerce, capturing a city (and country) in a state of change. 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.

Essays on everything from the music of Joni Mitchell to the declining quality of Bengali food from one of India's preeminent writers.

Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, a graceful depiction of middle-class Calcutta, seen through the lives of two interlinked families living in the city during the 1990s. Freedom Song is a novel about family life and city life at an uneasy moment in time. Set in Calcutta in 1993, the book begins by introducing us to Khuku, whose husband Shib is a retired executive and whose son has gone to live in America. Khuku's old friend Mini, a teacher suffering from a bad case of arthritis, is paying a visit, which gives the two women a chance to gossip and reminisce and see the town. Khuku's brother, Bhola, lives nearby with his wife and two grown children. Everyone is concerned about his son, Bhaskar, who has recently joined the Communist Party. He sells the party newspaper on the streets. He engages in street theater, and while no longer in his first youth, he remains unmarried. Freedom Song circles around this small upper-middle-class world, with its customs, memories, pleasures, and worries, but also ventures out into the wider world, in which the destruction of the venerable Babri Masjid by Hindu fundamentalists has started a cycle of sectarian violence. A novel of ordinary life, of work and love, shadowed by larger uncertainty, Freedom Song is a transfixing performance, deeply humane and winningly humorous, by one of the subtlest and sharpest writers of our time. A world of insight and feeling emerges from Amit Chaudhuri's wonderfully expansive sentences, and style is revealed as nothing less than a form of knowledge.

Writer and musician Amit Chaudhuri's elegant debut novel, in which an Indian ten-year-old experiences the entirely distinct experiences of life in Bombay, where his family lives, and Calcutta, where he visits relatives during his summer vacation. Ten-year-old Sandeep lives in a high-rise in Bombay, where his father has an important job that keeps him busy all the time. Come summer, Sandeep and his mother travel to Calcutta to spend time with his aunt, his self-absorbed and improvident uncle, and Abhi, his favorite cousin. His relatives' house is shadowy and rambling; the vast city around it ramshackle and alluring. They fascinate curious, observant Sandeep. Days pass; the heat grows; the rains come; the visit ends. In the winter, Sandeep and his family return to Calcutta--and encounter an unexpected turn of events. But Sandeep has arrived at a new sense of things, an understanding of how the marvelous inheres in the mundane, that will be his, we feel, for good. At once delicate and incisive, A Strange and Sublime Address succeeds in both immersing us in a boy's inner world and depicting that boy and his world from outside. It was Amit Chaudhuri's first book, the work of a novelist whose striking originality of conception would subsequently become ever more clear. The three decades since the publication of A Strange and Sublime Address have only confirmed its appeal and poetry.

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.

About the bookA unique collection of essays about the meaning and significance of storytelling in our time.At what point did we begin to say, 'We are all storytellers'? Far from being a timeless idea, the statement seems to go back to no further than the 1980s, coterminous with the dawning of a new kind of epic novel, an unprecedented supremacy for the English language, and the era of economic liberalisation. Who was it who made 'storytelling' synonymous with cultures outside the West? And could it just be conceivable that much of what's most worthwhile about writing and creativity occur on the fringes of the story?The essays in this book, delivered originally as talks at a Literary Activism symposium, look again at the assumptions that underlie the way we think of storytelling and storytellers. The contributors include novelists, academics and translators including Anjum Hasan, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Charles Bernstein, Geoffrey O'Brien, Gurvinder Singh, Jeremy Harding, Jean-Fr d ric Chevallier and Tiffany Atkinson.About the EditorAmit Chaudhuri is an award-winning novelist, poet, essayist and musician.

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.

About the BookA SHARP AND TIMELY ASSESSMENT OF WHAT THE PROTESTS OF 2020 SHOWED US ABOUT BEING INDIANOriginally a talk delivered at Jamia Millia Islamia University, New Delhi, in February 2020, and then published as an essay in Social Research Quarterly the following year, On Being Indian is many things. On one level, it is a record of the various events and utterances that led up to and characterised the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act in India. On another level, it questions, and shows us the limited value of, dichotomies such as the secular and the religious. The protests were an occasion for these humanist binaries to be dismantled exuberantly, often by thinkers who emerged at the time not from academic institutions but from diverse walks of life. Part analysis, part intellectual and cultural history, part literary criticism, and part an impassioned expression of, and meditation on, what it means to 'be Indian', this long essay is an exploration of how such a critique might be written in a way that's urgent but not journalistic; intellectually rigorous but not academic; political as well as imaginative.About the AuthorAmit Chaudhuri is an award-winning novelist, poet, essayist and musician.

**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.

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.

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.

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.

'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

'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.

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

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 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