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.
“Engrossing and impressive.” —Anita Desai, The New York Review of
Books
“Fascinating. . . . Chaudhuri explores ideas of modernity and
globalization in this essayistic appreciation. . . . [His]
insider-outsider status allows him to probe the city’s
eccentricities with both affection and unease.” —The New Yorker
“[A] lovely account. . . . [Marked by] the strength of Mr.
Chaudhuri’s prose and the acuity of his observations. . . . [His]
very personal story is a welcome contribution to the literature of
the city. It also recalls another author who first set foot in
Calcutta in 1962: V.S. Naipaul.” —The Wall Street Journal
“Equal parts memoir, literary history, sad-eyed sitcom. . . .
[Calcutta is] rich in presence and sings a beautiful tune all of
its own. . . . All the richer for presenting the city as a series
of unexpected memory tugs.” —The Guardian (London)
“Chaudhuri’s writing has a strangely mesmeric quality, using the
quotidian to draw the reader into the author’s mental world, his
own way of looking. . . . His prose displays an ability amounting
to brilliance for finding the right words to catch an emotion, a
thought, a personality.” —Financial Times
“Simply stunning. . . . Calcutta should be mandatory reading not
only for those unfamiliar with the place but for those who imagine
they know it well. . . . Blending reportage, meditation, history
and critique, it draws a fascinating portrait.” —The Independent
(London)
“A complex patchwork of topics, scenes and even genres. It’s a
crazy-quilt of a book that shows the author’s ear for reproducing
speech and his knack for sketching not only personalities but also
smells and, especially, tastes.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“India’s great cities have been the subject of many outstanding
travel books and now it is the turn of Calcutta. [Chaudhuri’s]
stories are spun out of a mix of history and family memoir, but the
joy here lies in his digressions, his wanderings through the city,
his remembrances and conjectures.” —The Sunday Times (London)
“Chaudhuri approaches his chronicle of the city of his birth with a
practised eye.” —London Review of Books
“A splendid read; an introduction to a city, or confirmation of it;
a meditation on expression and on [the author’s] own development as
a writer. . . . Chaudhuri’s prose is delicious, his humour wry.”
—Australian Book Review
“Beguiling. . . . Chaudhuri makes [Calcutta] sound like just the
place to be.” —The Spectator (London)
“Concussed by the noise of the new and beguiled by echoes of the
past, Chaudhuri maintains his novelist’s eye and ear for Calcutta’s
character and citizens. He combines the serendipity of the flâneur
with the sensitivity of the social historian.” —The Times
(London)
“Chaudhuri is a writer, academic and musician. He uses his
consciousness of all three in his narratives. He’s curious, he’s
edgy . . . he’s incisive, reflective and sometimes poetic.” —The
Tribune (India)
“Chaudhuri’s Calcutta has a different scope and intention
to Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City (about Mumbai) and to
William Dalrymple’s City of Djinns (about Delhi), but
like those books, it succeeds brilliantly in making sense of a
place few of us can know.” —The Observer (England)
“Unique and fascinating. . . . [Chaudhuri’s] masterful prose style
lingers on the tiny, quotidian details and draws out their
significance.” —Scottish Herald
“[Chaudhuri’s] most personal and perambulatory book to date. . . .
[Calcutta] is a modernist canvas that mirrors the complexity and
diversity of the metropolis itself and is in turn mirrored by
Chaudhuri’s idiosyncratic style, blending autobiography, literary
reportage, and personal essay.” —World Literature Today
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