Afternoon Raag

Description

Afternoon Raag is a book of branching and overlapping stories, a book that like memory moves unpredictably in time. In it, a nameless first-person narrator looks back at his student days in Oxford, a period of loneliness and discovery when his affections were torn between two women, and to the summer vacations that took him from England to Bombay, where his parents lived, and later to Calcutta, where he was born. Descriptions of Oxford’s green lawns and drab dorms, of friends and classes and the relentless drizzle, sit beside Bombay street scenes and recollections of the teacher, now dead, from whom the narrator and his mother learned music. Afternoon Raag is a book about the uncertainty of youth and the strange inevitability of growing up. Its images are wonder fully vivid; its rhythms elastic and entrancing. Throughout it is haunted by the spirit of the music teacher, the master singer who gives shape to the elusive and annihilating passage of time.”Those who are always acclaiming the ‘poetic prose’ of Ondaatje would do well to study Chaudhuri’s language.” —James Wood, The Guardian

“Amit Chaudhuri has, like Proust, perfected the art of the moment. . . . [His novels] were masterpieces of intimate observation: their narratives slight, their manner rich and lyrical. In Afternoon Raag, a student at Oxford . . . stood poised between two worlds; should he cling to his ‘Indianness’ and the richness of childhood memory, or should he let that world slide away from him and embrace his future?” —Hilary Mantel, The New York Review of Books

“Chaudhuri has only one of the novelist’s qualifications, but he has it in abundance . . . he is in love with life, and with people, and he can communicate this love directly and unsentimentally. Nothing is too small or too boring for him: he defamiliarises the everyday, reinvigorates the ordinary, and makes the humdrum seem exciting.” —Jonathan Coe, London Review of Books

“Nothing at all seems to happen, in the most beautifully modulated way.” —Anne Enright, The Guardian, Anne Enright’s Top 10 Slim Volumes 

“Like Van Gogh, he can invest the bed and chairs of an exile’s room with a radiant life of their own…He’s a sublime impressionist.” —Boyd Tonkin, New Statesman

“Chaudhuri’s idea of the novel as a collection of poetic musings is also displayed in his sensitivity to minute detail and his ability to transform the quotidian and the seemingly insignificant into the matter of intense reflection.” —Times Literary Supplement Amit Chaudhuri is a novelist, essayist, poet, and musician. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he is the author of more than a dozen books, several of which are available from NYRB, including the novels Friend of My Youth, Sojourn, A Strange and Sublime Address, Afternoon Raag, and Freedom Song; the work of memoir and music criticism Finding the Raga; and Sweet Shop: New and Selected Poems, 1985–2023. Formerly a professor of contemporary literature at the University of East Anglia, Chaudhuri is now a professor of creative writing and the director of the Centre for the Creative and the Critical at Ashoka University.  Chaudhuri has won many prizes, incluidng the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the  Los Angeles Prize for fiction, and the Commwealth Writers’ Prize.   He has made everal recordings of Indian classical music and experimental music.

James Wood has been a staff writer and book critic at The New Yorker since 2007. In 2009, he won the National Magazine Award for reviews and criticism. The author of several books of essays and two novels, he is a professor of the practice of literary criticism at Harvard University.US

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