Freedom Song: Three Novels [Hardcover]

Amit Chaudhuri (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 16, 1999

What most immediately galvanizes the reader of Freedom Song is the elegance and idiosyncrasy of Amit Chaudhuri's writing. In the words of Salman Rushdie: "[His] languorous, elliptical, beautiful prose is impressively impossible to place in any category at all." And it is this quality of ineffability that gives Chaudhuri's words the power they have to reveal--slowly, quietly, with a richness of sensual detail and subtle humor--the significance of the ordinary moments of life.

A boy spends a summer and a winter with his parents in a Bombay high-rise, and spends other summers in Calcutta immersed in the more traditional life of his uncle's extended family . . . A young man at Oxford, whose memories of home in Bombay bring both comfort and melancholy, faces a choice between "clinging to my Indianness, or letting it go, between being nostalgic or looking toward the future". . . The members of a Calcutta family are occupied with the task of finding the right woman for the twenty-eight-year-old son who would rather occupy himself with politics . . .

In these three short novels--Freedom Song, Afternoon Raag, and A Strange and Sublime Address ("The best portrait of India today I've read," wrote Margaret Drabble)--Chaudhuri illuminates the surprisingly nuanced intimate worlds of middle-class Indian men, women, and children. The novels brim with the author's stunning evocations of place and time, and his radiant descriptions and subtle explorations of the expected and surprising events of daily life; the effects of family connectedness and separation; the desires and demands of youth and age; the things and events that confirm "how mysterious the world [is] at every moment"; the hidden complexities of a fully lived inner life. From these elements Amit Chaudhuri shapes mesmerizing narratives, uncovering the remarkable in what might otherwise seem merely quotidian.

Freedom Song is the work of a writer--published here for the first time in the United States--possessed of an extraordinary gift.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Amit Chaudhuri's first book to be published in the United States comprises three short novels and is a masterpiece of the telling detail--in one paragraph he accomplishes what might take other writers entire volumes. Consider, for example, this description of family life in "A Strange and Sublime Address":

Monday morning came like a fever. Chhotomama would be at the dining-table, eating a rapid meal of dal, fish, and rice, trying to avoid chewing as much of it as possible before he rushed to work. Then he would rush upstairs where a pair of polished black shoes would be waiting for him like a long-promised gift. He would spend five minutes persuading his feet to enter the shoes, or the shoes to swallow his feet.... Over and over again he would shout "I'm late!" in the classic manner of the man crying "Fire!" or "Timber!" or "Eureka!" while Saraswati and Mamima scuttled around him like frightened birds.

The plot of "A Strange and Sublime Address" is slight--a young boy spends his summer with relatives in Calcutta--and consists mainly of a series of episodes strung together. But the characters are so lovingly limned and the places so intimately described that not even a one-way ticket to India could rival Chaudhuri's rendering.

He works similar magic on Oxford and Bombay in the second novel, "Afternoon Raag." Again, the story is almost inconsequential: a young Indian student at Oxford must choose between two women. What's really important here, however, are the character's memories of his music teacher back in Bombay; his mother's morning rituals; his father clipping his fingernails onto an old copy of The Times of India. Likewise, in the third novel, "Freedom Song," plot takes a back seat to the delicate workings of familial relationships as two clans attempt to marry off a "problem" relative. What makes these three short novels so satisfying is the fact that the author's remarkable sensibility is more than matched by his literary skillfulness. For readers in love with language, Freedom Song is the answer to a prayer. --Alix Wilber

From Publishers 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.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 480 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1st edition (February 16, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375404279
• ISBN-13: 978-0375404276
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.3 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,393,055 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great book for Bedtime reading!, August 20, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Freedom Song: Three Novels (Hardcover)

Not that it will put you to sleep, but rather it will lift you up from your banal surroundings and take you to a place far, far away.. (well, I'm in Harrisburg, PA and Calcutta and Bombay are just magical places- both very far, far away!) How beautifully he narrates the stories derived from his own childhood memories! I loved his writing style, his language, his humor, the characters in all three stories and most importantly his insights. He transforms the most flavorless moments of life into genuinely funny material. I found myself laughing out loud- laughing with Chaudhari and at myself- at many instances. I truly enjoyed reading this book and recommend it to anyone who enjoys good use of language and vivid pictures painted in green and orange and purple and blue and pink and yellow.. you get the point! :)

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Enchanting, May 26, 1999

By 

Pratip Mitra - See all my reviews

This review is from: Freedom Song: Three Novels (Hardcover)

I came across this book in the college bookstore by chance and decided to buy it. I must say it was an extremely good decision. This is one of the most relaxing and beautiful books that I have read so far. Especially the first novel, "A strange and sublime address", was the one which I especially liked. I too, like Chaudhuri, used to live in Bombay and used to visit Calcutta every year during the summer vacations, and reading Chaudhuri was like reliving my own experiences once again. Chaudhuri in all three of these novels has no plot or particular story to tell, but goes on to describe day to day living and experiences. This is what I liked most in his novels. He brings out beautifully the modes of thinking and subtleties in behavoiur peculiar to the culture of the Indian middle class. Reading this book would give anyone a pretty thorough insight into the life of the educated urban indian middle class. In short, if you want to read a book without any melodrama, wherein all you have to do is surrender yourself to its prose and let its narration of seemingly ordinary events weave its magic around you, leaving you thoroughly refreshed in the end, then this set of three novels by Chaudhuri is definitely the one for you. Chaudhuri is excellent and is definitely in league with the other great Indian novelists such as R.K.Narayan who write about India and her life with such mastery and exquisite craftsmanship in the English language.Absolutely enchanting reading.

14 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Freedom song:a celebration of lyrical prose, December 18, 1999

By 

Koonu (Bethesda, MD USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Freedom Song: Three Novels (Hardcover)

As someone whose childhood reading included Banaphool and Bibhuti Bandopadhaya(notably Adarsha Hindu Hotel), for me Amit Chaudhury's Freedom Song is another celebration of lyrical prose. I managed to read the British publication of the novel by the same name. As many reviewers have complained,here nothing happens in terms of events, yet everything seems to evolve in to a tapestry of human emotions recollected in tranquil prose. If you like to read Robert Ludlum or Stephen King instead of Chekov or Maupassant then dont waste your time and effort on Freedom Song. For the Indian readers I can say if you are missing Satyajit Ray since his death, here is an ersatz Ray. For the American audience this book can be described as some kind of a Jerry Seinfeldesqe rendition of middle class Calcuttans. Like Seinfeld no subject is a taboo for the writer including the undercurrents of Hindu nationalism surfacing in the Marxist state. However there is a slip showing in the facts narrated in this book. Writer alludes to middle class bengalis from Calcutta going away to Darjeeling and Gopalpur for vacations and pilgrimage respectively(page 51). If he meant Gopalpur in the neighbouring province of Orissa, then he must have meant Puri,with its sea beach and Jagannath temple. As some one hailing from there I can vouch for the bengali tourists flocking to Puri all year round in their Calcutta colors. I could not resist the temptation to include some of my favourite excerpts from the book.: >> But then during the curfew, when shops and offices,and everything else had been closed -ten days of nothing happening-.....It was as if a train they had been on had halted somewhere unexpectedly and they had been forced to take a holiday. She had found that he was not interested in discussing what was happening at all-the riots, the anger, more interested in rereading old copies of the Statesman which he had accumulated during the last week in a drawer. >>Pigeons rose suddenly into the sky between the buildings; their conversation evaporated rather than ended; the child began to make sounds as if it had had enough. (NOTE: Child is inanimate here and is referred to as it). >>When the meeting with the 'girl' and her parents was set to take place at an open air cafe near Salt Lake, Bhaskar, oddly,seemed both indifferent and cooperative and full of nimble self-assurance. >> Though the last cook, whose fragrant preparations of goat's meat and fish head dal were well known, had died two years ago of cholera, the present cook too had a reputation.>> >>But it was as if his recent eloquence in politics had left him inarticulate about personal matters. >>No one could decipher from her serenity that she had already seen in the same capacity a cost accountant, a marine engineer, and a lecturer.... >>'What did you think of her?' His mother put this question to him a few days later, deliberately absent-minded, as if she were questioning the air. A mongrel's bark followed the silence.