The Immortals [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

Amit Chaudhuri (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 25, 2009

The award-winning author of A New World now gives us an incantatory novel—at once plaintive and comic—about the powerful undercurrent of cultural and familial tradition in a society enthralled with the future.

Bombay in the 1980s: Shyam Lal is a highly regarded voice teacher, trained by his father in the classical idiom but happily engaged in teaching the more popular songs to well-to-do women, whose modern way of life he covets. Sixteen-year-old Nirmalya Sengupta is the romantically rebellious scion of an affluent family who wants only to study Indian classical music. With a little push from Nirmalya’s mother (Shyam’s prize pupil), Shyam agrees to accept Nirmalya as his student, entering into a relationship that will have unexpected and lasting consequences in both their lives. As the novel unfolds, we see how their two families come to challenge and change each other, and how student and teacher slowly mesh their differing visions of the world, and what place music holds in it.

With exquisite sensuous detail, with quiet humor, generosity, and unsentimental poignancy, The Immortals gives us a luminous portrait of the spiritual and emotional force of a revered Indian tradition, of two fundamentally different but intricately intertwined families, and of a society choosing between the old and the new.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Amit Chaudhuri is one of India’s most distinctive literary figures. While lesser writers obsess over the heat and dust, he charts the by-ways of the Indian soul . . . The Immortals is a memorable work–capacious, multi-faceted but intimate, it is Indian to the core but universal in its implications . . . [It is a] superb new novel . . . Handled with great sensitivity and wit . . . Masterful.”
–The Independent

“The Immortals is an important novel . . . There is a filigreed, Jamesian quality to Chaudhuri’s work, an urbanity and aesthetic style not often associated with Indian fiction . . . In Chaudhuri, we get an intense moral and psychological realism, a honed treatment of the fleeting specificities of everyday life.”
–Times Literary Supplement

“An entertaining, engaging read . . . Chaudhuri is a master of social comedy . . . And what a cast of humankind is conjured up.”
–Sunday Business Post (Ireland)

“Chaudhuri’s particular art lies in rendering beauty from normality. His characters linger in the mind; and his prose, with its exactness and elegance, its exquisite delineation of memory and emotion, has a strange, mesmerising grace.”
–Financial Times

“A graceful tale by a writer whose fiction is as beautiful as a classical ballet . . . There are so many reasons for liking this delicate human comedy of a novel . . . It is as if we are unofficial tourists being given an unofficial eye hole to look through . . . [This is] a book that not only brings India to life, it considers all life and all endings.”
–Irish Times

“The lyrical quality of Chaudhuri’s writing is striking. The imagery is vivid, the humour deliciously oblique . . . The great strength of the novel is the truthfulness of the emotional landscape . . . It invites honourable comparison with Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks.”
–The Times (London)

About the Author

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. 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.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; First edition (August 25, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 030727022X
• ISBN-13: 978-0307270221
• Product Dimensions: 5.8 x 1.2 x 8.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,301,298 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Harmonious look at life., August 27, 2009

By 

Dick Johnson (Oklahoma USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Immortals (Hardcover)

India has given us the spare writings of Narayan who wrings every bit of meaning out of each word; and the voluminous books of Ghosh and Seth. Chaudhuri's style incorporates the best of each of them.

Unusually, this is not a book heavily laden with India's politics and religions. People, their families and the vagaries of life are explored in 'The Immortals'. The book explores the relationships between the lower upper class and the upper lower class.

The practicalities of the voice teacher's life are set against the idealism of the privileged student. Through these two main characters, and their families, the author draws us into the Bombay of thirty years ago.

The story flows smoothly throughout and the low-key style of writing made it seem as if this was the real world with real people. Music is the 'glue' of the story that ties the characters together.

The book has the obligatory native words, but no glossary. This is not particularly a problem, but can be disconcerting to readers unfamiliar with Indian literature. Most can be figured out by the context and none are critical to the understanding of the story.

This would be a good introductory book to Indian fiction. Chaudhuri makes you comfortable with a place and people that are unfamiliar to Western readers. Give this one a try.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Enjoy the sheer beauty of the prose, August 26, 2009

By 

Benjamin (UK) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Immortals (Hardcover)

The story centres around Shyamji, singer and musician, the son of a notable singer; one of his students, Mallika, the wife of a successful businessman who herself has a voice that could make her famous; and Mallika's son Nirmalya, an increasing loner with high ideals and a critical outlook. Yet as the story unfolds we encounter many other characters, and as each is introduced given a clear image of that individual, however brief a role they play in the story.

The story follows the relationship between the various characters, and in particular the three mentioned, at a time when Shyamji and Mallika have attained what they will, and Nirmalya has yet to prove what he will achieve, as he considers his future and the direction of his education will take. Mallika looks to Shyamji to promote her as a singer, in turn Shyamji sees in Mallika a source of security, while Nirmalya regards Shyamji with the the shy reverence due his guru.

It is the fine attention to detail which characterises Chaudhuri's writing, and which enables him to convey so vividly the sights, sounds and smells of India. It is a beautifully written book, with three main protagonists who each has his or her own appeal. It is a story about ideals, perceptions and realities. It is above all a story to be enjoyed for the sheer beauty of the prose.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating Look at Indian Classical Music and Art, and a Culture in Transition, January 4, 2010

By 

L. Erickson "Mommy Mystic" (Los Angeles, CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Immortals (Hardcover)

I just happened to pick this book up at the library on a whim, partly because I am interested in Indian culture, but I am not familiar with the author's other books or Indian contemporary literature in general. It was not a light read - I can sympathize with the reviewer who said he couldn't follow all the characters (I flipped back and forth at times to refresh my memory.) Also, another reviewer mentioned that many Indian terms are used, in relation to music and Hindu culture, and this is definitely true (this was less of an issue for me, as I have studied these enough to follow.)

Despite these minor hurdles, I ended up enjoying the book, mostly because of the snapshot it provides of a culture in transition. Through its various characters the author explores the role of classical Indian music and culture in Bombay as business and Western culture invades, and as Indian pop culture develops in its own right. In addition, the insights about art in general, and particularly on the difference between Western 'self-expressive' art/music and classical Eastern 'religious' art/music, were very intriguing to me. And as the main character develops an interest in philosophy and metaphysics, that becomes a platform for probing the relationship and differences between Western and Eastern philosophy also.
So to me, it's a heady book, and a thematic one, but a good read if you are interested in either classical or contemporary Indian culture, or both.