Customer Reviews

Freedom Song: Three Novels

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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! :)

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.

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.

Chaudhuri has written a rich and earthy rendering of life in India in this work (I enjoyed these two short stories much more than the tale set in England, which to me lacked the energy and humor of the other two).

He uses a beautiful, vibrant and complex fabric of language in rendering his characters and their lives, rather like the traditional "Sari" worn by women of his native land.

While he pokes plenty of fun at the the idosyncracies and the travails of his characters and of the life there, it is without malice, a gentle prodding, that of a fond and familiar friend.

Worthy of the term "literature", definitely recommended!

It would not do justice to merely chew and digest this book (to borrow a cliched quote). Rather like a fine moist chocolate cake or cognac perhaps, swirl forever and drench in its vivid flavours. Being son of a Bengali expatriate family myself, AC's narrative about a small boy's summer vacations in Calcutta are not just beatifully picturesque but also remarkably coincident with my own recollections of similar surroundings from many years past. The description of life as a graduate student in a foreign country and of the institution of arranged marriages are similarly revealing. One just hopes that his future novels have a storyline to match his prose.

Amit Chaudhuri has the unusual gift of turning every little mundane detail in daily life into poetic beauty. How often does one come across a book wherein nothing major happens in the story yet one is kept captivated simply by the sheer allure of the language?

What a quietly beautiful book! Everyday stories, from everyday people in India and England. This was the first book that made me want to move to Calcutta and never leave. Absolutely every sentance in these 3 stories is magically crafted, so that even a woman hanging out the laundry is a new and poetic experience. If that sounds like tedious writing to you, well you're wrong! All these stories are real page turners. I have been taking longer lunches, staying up late, and even reading while I walk, because I cannot put the book down.

Is this Proustian? Yes. The author has extraordinary powers of observation and description. He seems to remember the slightest details of living and presents them in the most significant way. Yet, I have to confess I only made it halfway through this book, which consists of three short novels. The first novel, "A Strange and Sublime Address," was quite wonderful and presented carefully constructed details of (I assume) the author's observations from childhood as he visited his uncle in Calcutta during his summer vacation. The "plot" is really the summation of observations and feelings as the summer eventually ends and the boy in the story has to go back to Bombay where he lives. The second novel, "Afternoon Raag," began to wear on me. Perhaps it was too much of a good thing, and I began to long for more activity, more action, a plot. With regret I had to put the book down, but I fault more the publisher than the author for putting these novels together when in fact they are better appreciated apart from one another, separated by time and space so that the reader has a chance to recover from one before throwing him or herself into another. I don't fault the author. He clearly is an amazing writer. I will definitely pick this book up again soon and read more of it when I'm ready to.

Amit Chaudhuri's "Freedom Song" is a collection of three short novels which were first published in Britain as separate volumes: A Strange and Sublime Address, (1991); Afternoon Raag, (1993); and Freedom Song, (1998).

Chaudhuri received considerable critical acclaim for these novellas -- for example, "The London Review of Books" said: "... he writes better than just about anyone of his generation." In May 2000, Chaudhuri won the Los Angeles Times award for fiction.

Although not much happens in any of the novellas, they succeed in
presenting exquisite miniatures of middle-class life in contemporary metropolitan India. The publisher has inserted summaries of each novella up front; otherwise, the reader would need quite some time figuring out the relationships between characters--Chaudhuri's storytelling overlooks this.

"A Strange and Sublime Address" paints languorous impressions of life in Calcutta as seen by a ten-year-old boy, Sandeep, during two vacations from his schooling in Bombay. At his uncle's Calcutta house, on one occasion, the narrator looks through a shutter: "A bhelpuri vendor was wandering past, his prop under his arm, the basket of bhelpuri balanced almost stylishy, like a Malayasian fedora, on his head. Later, the key man went by, with a cluster of keys around a large ring, the metal shimmering against the sun, the keys jangling. The vendor had called out in a loud voice, 'Bhelpuri!' but the key man had said nothing; he had simply shaken the ring and let the jangling keys speak for him. The strange metallic whisper of the keys could be heard, immaterial and ghostly, even when the man had disappeared, seemingly evaporated by the heat."

On another occasion, the narrator roams in the neighborhood, keenly observing minutiae and wondering what sort of story a writer would weave around such observations: "...the story would never be a satisfying one, because the writer, like Sandeep, would be too caught up jotting down the irrelevancies and digressions that make up lives, and the life of a city, rather than a good story --till the reader would shout 'Come to the point.'" "Come to the point" Chaudhuri does not; however, his descriptions cast a spell.

"Afternoon Raag" is a first-person portrayal of the narrator's student days at Oxford -- his casual involvement with two female students; nostalgic memories of his parents in India; and his fond recall of the classical music teacher in India. Structured loosely like a Hindustani "raag," this novella's prose rises to the poetic.

"Freedom Song," set in the early 1990's, describes the life history of two interrelated middle-class Calcutta families. The publisher's introductory summary says: two of the main characters, Khuku and Mini, "spend their time talking about family, friends, health, and occasionally, Muslims and the Babri Masjid." The summary errs -- not "occasionally," they talk frequently about the Muslims.

"Freedom Song" opens with Khuku's being awakened too early in the morning by the loud Muslim prayer and her guest, Mini, commiserating at this nuisance: "They are going too far! And it isn't really Indian, it sounds like Bedouins." And "Each day, at some point, they talked of the Muslims. They talked of how, by the next century, there would be more Muslims than Hindus in the country. Mini being the teacher, had the facts and figures..." During another talk, Mini says, "What if one mosque had gone -- for hundreds of temples had been destroyed before. She could not understand what the fuss was about...." "Who'll rebuild those temples?" Khuku agrees: "That's right. No one talks about them." Mini decides to vote for the Hindu nationalist party, BJP: "It was no bad thing that they toppled that mosque."

Despite these contentious remarks, "Freedom Song," like the other two novellas, lacks in narrative tension. Rendered in evocative prose, Chaudhuri's carefully observed writing remains at the surface, confining itself to the thin segment of the upper-middle class. Nowhere is there a mention of the squalor and abysmal poverty of the Calcutta slums, even though the point of view chosen is third-person omniscient. In the earlier novellas, the childlike and adolescent points of view make the surface observations easier to accept.

The details of daily Indian life Chaudhury so masterfully depicts will appeal more to the Western reader's exotic quest than to the Indian reader.

I have read one of the three novels in this collection separately and I will jot down my thoughts of it here. I will definitely try to read the other two as well since I was very impressed with Mr. Chaudhuri's novel Afternoon Raag which I will give my thoughts on here: This book is not very large but it packs a big punch! It is esentially the reminescences of an Indian student in Oxford. The power and beauty of the book lies in the wonderful descriptions contained herein. I grew up in Oxford (and it is where I enjoy being the most even now) and Chaudhuri captures the essence of the town beautifully. His free-flowing, beautiful writing is what makes this book such a delightful read and it is an wonderful way of losing oneself in memories of one of the prettiest places in the world to live in. In addition the author intermixes his experiences of Oxford with his memories of India and especially of his time with his music teacher. A delight.