Freedom Song : Three Novels

Alice Truax

An immensely gifted writer...his novels are crammed with breathtaking sentences, sharp characterizations...he is perpetually delighted with 'the enduring allure of the everyday.'
— The New York Times Book Review

David Wiegand

One of the most dazzling new talents of any nationality. —San Francisco Chronicle

Edward Hower

Beautifully evocative, rich with fascinating improvisations on the themes of family life, memory, and dreams. —Philadelphia Inquirer

London Review of Books

He has proved he can write better than just about anyone of his generation...He is in love with life, and with people, and he can communicate this love directly and unsentimentally.

Michiko Kakutani

Chaudhuri has created an indelible portrait of India...a Proustian tapestry....He conjures a web of relationships among family, neighbors, friends...he gives us the busy rhythms of a morning in Calcutta, the languor of a summer afternoon...a sense of time and flux is created...Deaths, marriages, births, the loss of a job, a new car...all are woven effortlessly into a seamless piece of music.
—The New York Times

Richard Eder

He evokes the sweet decorousness of a way of life....he has written with persuasive resonance of an older India of family ties and shaped ceremony exiled into contemporary formlessness. —Los Angeles Times

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Attended by its watchful, intuitive handmaiden--the laudable Chaudhuri, in his first U.S. publication--the English idiom emerges new-skinned and crying healthily in the humid air and shuttered rooms of Calcutta and Bombay. Collected in one volume, a primer on Chaudhuri's remarkable sui generis prose, these three modern, postcolonial novels poise their characters delicately between the ebb of the future and the flow of the past. This tension is often dramatized by the characters' use of the English tongue. A Strange and Sublime Address (1991) tells of the Bombay-bred Sandeep who aspires to be an English writer and, at 10 years old, already uses such words as "tentative," "gingerly" and "enthusiastic." Morning piles on midday, which builds to evening (or "cow dust" as the Bengali word means literally) as Sandeep spends his school holiday with his poorer and less educated cousins in Calcutta. In their house, and in Chaudhuri's nostalgic gaze, routine is elevated to ritual. The uncle's shaving and the aunts' application of "kumkum powder in the parting of their hair" are sacred arts; the sound of bangles clinking, rattling keys and "dervishing" fans are hymnals in the domestic temple. The North Indian protagonist of Afternoon Raag (1993), like Chaudhuri himself once did, studies English literature at Oxford. Far from home, and deeply immersed in the transporting lines of Lawrence's poems, he remembers vividly scenes from his childhood and the traditional music he played with his now-dead guru. "The raags," he says, "woven together, are a history, a map, a calendar, of northern India..." The simultaneous affairs the narrator carries on with two Indian girls--one skinny and one plump--provide a framework for his recollections and perfume the book with heady dormroom love. The final novel in the trio, Freedom Song, is a work of greater length and complexity than the preceding two; in it Chaudhuri hits the full stride of his mature voice. Dwelling longer on characterization, he examines the intricacies and contradictions of middle-class life in Calcutta through the relationships of one extended family. Bhaskar, a son more thin and dark than his mother wishes him, has compromised his chances of making a good match by joining the Communist Party and a street theater troupe. Bhaskar's Aunt Khuku and her friend Mimi winter out their late years in an intimate conspiracy of shawl-shrouded, tea-drinking gossip and political conversation. What may frustrate readers of the first two novels--that Chaudhuri seems to chronicle events as they occur to him, and pushes the stories to their ends by the thin connectives "one time" and "the next day"--gives way here to a more deliberate plotting that is nonetheless charmingly concerned with the behavior of Calcuttan pigeons and the rain-damp laundry on the line. (Mar.) FYI: A Strange and Sublime Sadness won the 1991 Betty Trask Award and the Commonwealth Writers Prize, and Afternoon Raag won two prizes, in Britain.

Library Journal

This collection of three novels is Chaudhuri's first publication in this country. Set in Bombay and Calcutta and written in a quiet, meditative style, the novels reveal the intricacies of family life, providing the reader with insightful observation and very little directly related dialog. We see into the characters' thoughts but only from the narrator's perspective, as if we were looking through a window in the ceilings of the rooms where the action takes place. A Strange and Sublime Address describes a small boy from Bombay and his visit to relatives in Calcutta. In Afternoon Raag, a young Indian man, a graduate student at Oxford, reflects on his parents, his recently deceased music teacher, and the two women with whom he has become involved. Finally, Freedom Song follows two related families in Calcutta during a time of religious and political upheaval. These novels are distinguished by their peaceful and poetic tone. Highly recommended for both public and academic libraries.--Rebecca A. Stuhr, Grinnell Coll. Libs., IA

Alice Truax

An immensely gifted writer...his novels are crammed with breathtaking sentences, sharp characterizations...he is perpetually delighted with 'the enduring allure of the everyday.'
— The New York Times Book Review

David Wiegand

One of the most dazzling new talents of any nationality.
— San Francisco Chronicle

Edward Hower

Beautifully evocative, rich with fascinating improvisations on the themes of family life, memory, and dreams.
— Philadelphia Inquirer

London Review of Books

He has proved he can write better than just about anyone of his generation...He is in love with life, and with people, and he can communicate this love directly and unsentimentally.

Michiko Kakutani

Chaudhuri has created an indelible portrait of India...a Proustian tapestry....He conjures a web of relationships among family, neighbors, friends...he gives us the busy rhythms of a morning in Calcutta, the languor of a summer afternoon...a sense of time and flux is created...Deaths, marriages, births, the loss of a job, a new car...all are woven effortlessly into a seamless piece of music.
— The New York Times

Richard Eder

He evokes the sweet decorousness of a way of life....he has written with persuasive resonance of an older India of family ties and shaped ceremony exiled into contemporary formlessness.
— Los Angeles Times

Washington Post Book World

Perfectly renders a portrait of modern Calcutta, its chaos and decay, its culture…and street theater.

Pankaj Mishra

...[E]very fiction...must create an illusion of reality; nad Chaudhuri's novels succeed in doing so to an impressive degree. He has such a tender intimacy with the world and the people who inhabit it...
— The NY Review of Books

Kirkus Reviews

Three brilliantly written short novels by a young Anglo-Indian author who has been praised throughout Great Britain as one of his generation's finest prose stylists. And the reader immediately sees why in the opening pages of "A Strange and Sublime Address" (1991), which recounts in delightfully funny detail the perceptions of Sandeep, a 10-year-old boy from Calcutta whose family pays an extended visit to his uncle's bustling and eccentric Bombay home, then returns a year and a half later to chart the progress of Uncle Chhotomama, a loony mixture of communist ideologue and failed businessman whom Salman Rushdie might have invented. The story is plotless; Chaudhuri simply presents a parade of gorgeous vignettes and tableaus filled with wondrously observed small moments (when a toddler takes one hesitant step, "its other leg forgot it was a leg, and the child, bewildered by its own body, collapsed in a soft heap"). "Afternoon Raag" (1993) depicts with comparable facility the confused sensibility of a music student (perhaps the grown-up Sandeep, though not specifically identified as him) at Oxford, poised uncertainly between the comforting world of his parents back in Bombay and the contrasting promises of two girl students he tells himself he loves. The piece is slight but beautifully done. The more ambitious "Freedom Song" (1995) examines the relations among two families living together temporarily in present-day Calcutta: Shib, who works in a British-owned chocolate factory, and his wife Xhuku; and then also Xhuku's weirdly extended "family of ne'er-do-wells" whose communal raison d'être seems to be the need to arrange a proper marriage for Xhuku's scandalous nephew Bhaskar, adevout communist who performs political street theater. The two families' ineffably comic, intrinsically melancholy interactions are rendered with quiet compassion in a tour de force that suggests an Indian Buddenbrooks in miniature. Some of the most accomplished fiction of the decade.