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Penguin Books Ltd - Amit Chaudhuri

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101 pages

English

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A Strange and Sublime Address, Amit Chaudhuri s first book, features a Bengali boy who spends his school holidays at his uncle's home in Calcutta. Heatwaves, thunderstorms, mealtimes, prayer-sessions, shopping expeditions and family visits create a shifting background to the shaping of people's lives. Delicate, nuanced, full of exquisite detail, A Strange and Sublime Address is a small masterpiece. The book also includes nine short stories about the city.

Informations

Publié par	Penguin Books Ltd
Date de parution	21 octobre 2012
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9788184759587
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0450€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Amit Chaudhuri

A STRANGE AND SUBLIME ADDRESS
With a new foreword by Colm Toibin
Contents
Praise for A Strange and Sublime Address
Dedication
Foreword
A Strange and Sublime Address
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Stories
A Road in Late March
Lakshmi Poornima Night
The Happiest Man in the World
Jadav
Episode Concerning a House
The New Maidservant
When We Moved to This House
Like a Dream
Coolness
Follow Penguin
Copyright
Praise for A Strange and Sublime Address
Wonderfully observed . . . an indelible portrait of India - Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
Those who are always rushing towards the magic realism of a Rushdie should read Chaudhuri: here is real magic instead -James Wood, Guardian
I read the book in one sitting and greatly enjoyed it - Satyajit Ray
Funny, delicate, sensuous, evocative . . . The best portrait of India today I ve read -Margaret Drabble
Chaudhuri writes precisely, carefully, trying to capture in the rhythms of his prose the faded happiness of things, the strange, pure remembered moments -Carmen Callil and Colm T ib n, The Modern Library: The 200 Best Novels in English since 1950
To read Chaudhuri is to o er yourself the unmitigated pleasure of being in the company of the absolutely first rate, to see again the possibilities of the novel as an art form -Jim Harrison
No lover of literature will fail to love these vivid novels by a master of prose -Annie Dillard
Through innovative metaphors and images, he brings the simplest aspects of life-a bath, a drive, an illness-to a new level - Boston Review
Sentence by sentence, Amit Chaudhuri is a precise, sensual writer with a great gi for storytelling . . . at once radiant and revealing -Ann Beattie
Best not to think of Chaudhuri as Indian, but rather as a great writer of the world - Hungry Mind Review
To my parents
Note: the word mama , in Bengali, and presumably any other North Indian language, means maternal uncle . Different prefixes may be attached to this word, to describe and categorize the different types of maternal uncles that exist in this world. For instance, chhoto means small or young ; therefore, Chhotomama in the story means Junior Uncle . Chhotomama s wife is called Mamima in the story; this may be roughly translated as motherly maternal aunt . Children are usually addressed by their nicknames; these may or may not have a meaning. All in all, the Bengali family is a tangled web, an echoing cave, of names and appellations, too complicated to explain individually. Their meaning, hopefully, is brought out in context.
Foreword
S andeep, meanwhile, had come to the conclusion that the grown-ups were mad, each a er his or her own fashion. Simple situations were turned into complex dramatic ones; not until then did everybody feel important and happy. In Amit Chaudhuri s A Strange and Sublime Address , Sandeep is a small boy, an only child who lives in a Bombay high-rise and who, with his parents, makes two long visits to his extended family in Calcutta. The book is the story of the atmosphere in the small house in Calcutta that they visit. Twenty-five years a er its initial publication, Chaudhuri s novel about a young boy s view of family life and the world around him seems as elegant and exquisite and original as it did on its initial publication.
Sandeep watches his relatives, his parents, the servants and the neighbours, alert to everything-sounds, smells, domestic habits, moods, weather, plants. He is vastly amused by tiny details such as his uncle s car which breaks down, his bustling morning rituals. He spends most of the time, however, with his two cousins and with the women in the family. He notices the women s clothes and perfumes with relish; he listens to their voices in a way that suggests both a curious child and a budding novelist. He registers what happens precisely and carefully; the rhythms of the book follow the faded happiness of things, the strange remembered moments, but render them as urgent, present, almost pure.
Sandeep is smart, and Chaudhuri is clever enough and talented enough to let his observations stand for a lot, to let what he sees and hears become the drama of the book. He also manages a tonal high-wire act by convincing the reader that this is the world that a child observed, a child who knows no more than a child might-but also that it is remembered using the prism of a child s gaze by a writer in possession of a rich prose style, a writer who does not wish to comment much, or o er analysis or additions.
The book then is both knowing and unknowing; the events are both experienced with immediacy and remembered with grace and care, but without nostalgia or too much easy humour. Chaudhuri wishes to evoke the past, and that is done not only with an undertone of sadness at the notion that these things are over, but with a relish arising from the power of what is remembered, the force of its detail, its physicality, its immediacy. Something that happened in childhood in this book takes on all the glittering excitement and precision of the present, as though memory itself can be more truthful and pressing than experience, or as though memory itself were, indeed, a kind of rich experience.
There are moments of evocative beauty in the novel, such as the family s visit to the elderly relatives, the presence of a new baby, a rainstorm, the uncle s illness, his time in hospital and his recovery. The book depends on its own tones and textures rather than on twists of fate or plot. It allows the act of evocation itself to have a sort of narrative energy.
The strange and sublime address is given as the house in Calcutta, followed by the names of the outer world, ending with Asia, and then Earth, and then the Solar System, and then the Universe. This echoes Chapter 1 of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce, in which Stephen Dedalus gives his address in almost similar terms. Joyce s book deals with the growth of Stephen, who is viewed with the same earnestness with which Stephen might have viewed himself, as well as a glaze of irony-that of an author watching over his subject years later, as he sets out on his road to freedom.
Stephen Dedalus s world in Joyce s novel is both his private consciousness and the public life of his country. The tension between Ireland and England or between Catholic doctrine and liberalism are as fully part of the narrative as Stephen s private perceptions or his arguments with himself. These tensions matter to Stephen emotionally; they become part of the nets that have him captured and which he must fly from. A Portrait of the Artist moves de ly between the public and the private, between the smithy of the soul and the conscience of the race . Joyce allows Stephen s experience to embody Ireland as much as reject it or evade it.
In Chaudhuri s book, on the other hand, although politics and a sense of public a airs are allowed into the narrative, they are there glancingly, as part of the flavour of things, and are no more important than anything else. For a foreign reader, A Strange and Sublime Address is fascinating because it does not dramatize the legacy of Partition, or deal with the caste system in India, or use the novel to enrich our knowledge of large questions of identity and politics. The book normalizes and domesticates what is o en presented as exotic or even alarming.
Chaudhuri allows his characters a presence that is fully personal, that is freely their own, rather than o ering them to us as examples of what India is like now, or what colonialism has done. He does full justice to them within the limits of the actual world they inhabit. Because his impulse is essentially poetic or cinematic rather than political, these limits cease to matter-they blur at the edges or become insignificant under the pressure of acute observation and carefully controlled cadence.
Something of a similar nature happens in John McGahern s book Memoir as the world of the child in relation to what is around him is captured in elaborate detail and with the e ortless grace of a serious prose stylist. But the brightness which memory evokes in McGahern s book serves only to make the darkness of the book sharper and more poignant. Memoir is not only about the pain of time passing, but the pain of what actually happened at the time. Such bitter shadows also appear in Joyce s novel. In both of these books, some of the energy comes from the way in which the idyll of childhood and the innocence of youth are disturbed by adult indi erence or by cruelty.
What distinguishes Chaudhuri s book is his concern with happiness, the hardest subject of all for the writer of fiction. It would have been simple in his book to bring in the drama of family conflict or some nightmare images of poverty and destitution. Instead, A Strange and Sublime Address is concerned to register ease and fullness, but without nostalgia or sentimentality or false pleading. The evocations of ease and tolerance are captured in the tone of the prose itself, the unstretched and languid style, the exact and unforced descriptions, the mildly amused ironic undertones.
In other evocative and poetic books which deal with images of childhood-books such as The Diary of Helena Morley , translated from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Bishop, or some sections of Jean-Paul Sartre s The Words , or Emmanuelle Guattari s I, Little Asylum , or the moments in Proust which deal with the boy and his grandmother at Balbec-there is also a sense of tender particularity, of the need to write down what it was like so that those rooms and voices will not fade, will not be forgotten. The power rests in that urge to remember, capture and hold. The greater the precision, it seems, the more the book seems to propel that power outwards, to the reader who knew