Synopses & Reviews
The award-winning author Amit Chaudhuri has been widely praised for the beauty and subtle power of his writing and for the ways in which he makes “place” as complex a character as his men and women. Now he brings these gifts to a spellbinding amalgam of memoir, reportage, and history in this intimate, luminous portrait of Calcutta.
Chaudhuri guides us through the city where he was born, the home he loved as a child, the setting of his acclaimed novels—a place he now finds captivating for all the ways it has, and, perhaps more powerfully, has not, changed. He shows us a city relatively untouched by the currents of globalization but possessed of a “self-renewing way of seeing, of inhabiting space, of apprehending life.” He takes us along vibrant avenues and derelict alleyways; introduces us to intellectuals, Marxists, members of the declining haute bourgeoisie, street vendors, domestic workers; brings to life the city’s sounds and smells, its architecture, its traditional shops and restaurants, new malls and hotels. And, using the historic elections of 2011 as a fulcrum, Chaudhuri looks back to the nineteenth century, when the city burst with a new vitality, and toward the politics of the present, finding a city “still not recovered from history” yet possessed of a singular modernity.
Chaudhuri observes and writes about Calcutta with rare candor and clarity, making graspable the complex, ultimately ineluctable reasons for his passionate attachment to the place and its people.
Synopsis
From the acclaimed author of the novels The Immortals and Freedom Song: a spellbinding book that combines memoir, reportage, and history in an intimate, richly sensual portrait of the city of Calcutta.Amit Chaudhuri has been consistently praised for the beauty and subtle power of his writing and for the ways in which he makes "place" as complex a character as his men and women. Now, he brings these gifts to a chronicle of two years in which he made Calcutta his home. In a mesmerizing narrative he takes us into the heart of a metropolis relatively untouched by the currents of globalization but possessed of a "self renewing way...of apprehending life." The narrative moves through the city's vibrant avenues and its derelict alleyways, introduces us to its homeless and its well-heeled, describes its architecture and food, its sounds and smells, its past and present politics, and makes abundantly clear the complex reasons for the author's passionate attachment to the place and its people. It is an unusually beguiling, eye-opening journey that evokes all that is most particular and extraordinary about the city.
About the Author
Amit Chaudhuri is the author of several award-winning novels and is an internationally acclaimed musician and essayist. Freedom Song: Three Novels received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction. His many international honors include the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize; most recently, he became the first recipient of the Infosys Prize for Humanities—Literary Studies. He is a contributor to the London Review of Books, Granta, and The Times Literary Supplement. He is currently professor of contemporary literature at the University of East Anglia and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.