Amit Chaudhuri – författare

'One of our most entertaining writers' Deborah Levy 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.'Paris provides the perfect setting for this beautiful, quietly experimental novel about a man floating through a city he struggles to find his place in' New Statesman'Chaudhuri is a master of mundane, hallucinatory moments, calling to mind Rachel Cusk or W. G. Sebald' Hua Hsu, New Yorker 'Chaudhuri's minutely observed Paris comes to life because it is real, not romanticised. In so many ways, his perceptions are a lesson in how to see a place as it is, rather than as you want itto be' Herald

**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

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.

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

''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 beimaginative, 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.

''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 beimaginative, 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.

'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.

This important study from the prizewinning novelist and critic Amit Chaudhuri explores D. H. Lawrence's position as a 'foreigner' in the English canon. Focusing on the poetry, Chaudhuri examines how Lawrence's works, and Lawrence himself, have been read, and misread, in terms of their 'difference.' In contrast to the Leavisite project of placing Lawrence in the English 'great tradition,' this study demonstrates how Lawrence's writing brings into question the notion of 'Englishness' itself. It also shows how Lawrence's aesthetic sets him apart radically from both his Modernist contemporaries and his Romantic forbears. The starting-point of this enquiry into Lawrentian 'difference' is, for the purposes of this study, the poetry, its stylistic features, the ways in which it has been read, and, importantly, involves a search for a critical language by which it, and its 'difference', might be addressed. In doing so, it takes recourse to Jacques Derrida's notions of 'grammatalogy' and 'ecriture', and Michel Foucault's notion of 'discourse'. Referring to Lawrence's travel writings about Mexico and Italy, his essays on European and Etruscan art, on Mexican marketplaces and rituals, and American literature, and especially to his poetic manifesto, 'The Poetry of the Present,' this book shows how Lawrence was working towards both a theory and a practice that critique the post-Enlightenment unitary European self. Chaudhuri also, radically, allows his own post-colonial identity to inform his reading of the poetry, and to let the poems enter into a conversation with that identity. This is the first time that Lawrence's poetry has been discussed in this way, in the light of post-colonial and post-structuralist theory; it is also the first time a leading post-colonial writer of his generation has taken as his subject a major canonical English writer, and, through him, remapped the English canon as a site of 'difference.'

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.

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

The new novel about the present, the past, and the slippage between private and public life-from a writer who has 'like Proust, mastered the art of the moment.' (Hilary Mantel)An 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.

A 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

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.

'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.

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.

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.

**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.

**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

Essays on everything from the music of Joni Mitchell to D. H. Lawrence to globalization, from one of India’s preeminent writers“I’m an Indian, so of course I write about India. But then, again, I don’t write about India. I’m not interested in writing about India. This means I’m not entirely, or comfortably, a part of the history of the Indian novel in English either. Nor can I be part of a history that’s now been appropriated by literary journalism and publishing houses: of the form of the novel. It’s not that I’m resistant to appropriation. I’m unfit for appropriation. This may be a good place to be in.”A brilliant prose stylist and keen innovator of literary form, Amit Chaudhuri is one of the most singular voices in contemporary letters whose essays, like his fiction, defy categorization and display a sensibility uniquely his own. Incompleteness gathers some of Chaudhuri’s best essays and criticism from more than two decades. In these pieces, Chaudhuri writes on everything from Rabindranath Tagore and Joni Mitchell to the troubles with Indian modernity, from the humble yet delicious snack mix chanachur to globalisation’s appropriation of narrative storytelling over poetic incompleteness. Drolly humorous, and filled with unexpected insight, Incompleteness is incontrovertible proof that Chaudhuri is one of our most original and gifted interpreters of the world after globalisation.