Customer Reviews

The Immortals

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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.

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.

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.

...and it never did! I'm a huge fan of Lahiri, Mistry and Roy, and was hoping for another well-written insight into the lives of Desis, and was sadly disappointed. None of the characters are very interesting; in fact, the author never lets us really get to know them. It's like reading about any old boring bourgeois family. Their character of the music guru, Shyam, could have been far more developed, but even his life was oversimplified and seemed drab. Also irritating- the author clearly tries to impress the reader with words like "obstreperous" and "sempiternal" where "unruly" and "eternal" would have done perfectly.
I was not impressed by the vocab NOR the story. Don't waste your time.

The Immortals is a tale of two families: one luxuriating in a new world of corporate affluence and the other getting by on the old world of musical tradition. Together, they are joined by a "common, day-to-day pursuit of music."

Music is the thread that ties this book together, and Amit Chaudhuri knows his stuff. He is, himself, a composer and musician and the meticulous detail and grand amount of exposition is clearly written by a man who has inhabited the world he creates.

This is a populous novel; it's easy for the reader to lose his or her way in the first 50 pages, and indeed, in other places in the book when many characters are introduced and obscure musical terms are freely used. It demands close attention to the text. Those who surrender to the text will be rewarded with lush language and a complex emotional landscape.

The key character, Nirmalya Sengupta, is the teenage scion of a corporate father who enjoys all the trappings of the Indian nouveau riche. Not unlike many teenagers, he is trying to find his own way with the judgmental zeal that only the privileged can exude. With his long hair, grungy goatee, torn kurta and earmarked copy of Will Durant's Story of Philosophy, Nirmalya is a purist: he dreams of classical music and softly condemns his mother Mallika, an excellent singer, for "selling out" to commerce over art. He is also more than a little naïve and spoiled: "Nirmalya had never known want; and so he couldn't understand those who said, or implied, they couldn't do without what they already had."

His guru Shyamji, is from the Brahmin caste; his father was a famous classical musician, but he has squandered his artistic inheritance by tutoring and enabling the dreams of the wealthy. Nirmalya might claim he "sold his soul" by straddling the two distinct worlds of classical versus popular music. The juxtaposition of Nirmalya and Shyamji sets up an intriguing premise: who should be granted more respect, the "upper born", artistically-gifted guru or the newly-wealthy who are now, for all intents and purposes, his employers? What is the relationship between commerce and art and how does it "play out" in reality?

Mallika - Nirmalya's mother -- ponders this diachtomy: "Mallika had wanted recognition, that pure woebegone desire for a reward for her gift had accompanied her life from the start but never overwhelmed it; but she hadn't wanted to dirty her hands in the music world; she's wanted to preserve the prestige of being, at once, an artist and the wife of a successful executive. She knew, with an uncomplicated honesty, what her worth was; to what extent would she compromise or to which level stoop if others pretended not to."

There are flaws. The greatest is that at times, the demand for familiarity with Indian music - particularly classical music - can be disconcerting or even downright frustrating to the reader. A glossary or short introduction would have been immensely helpful. Still, The Immortals is a fascinating look at the Bombay of 30 years ago -- a Bombay that existed in pre-boom India. Most of all, it's a meditation on how - or if - art and commerce interconnect through astute observations that are both precise and insightful.

I opened this book with great anticipation, and found myself in a tortuous journey - as thought I had dementia. I couldn't remember the characters from one page to the next, how they related to each other, who the heck they WERE (I couldn't picture them at all) and the vocabulary and allusions to music and other matters were from another world somewhere. I plugged along for about an hour, twice. Finally, I skipped to the end, and found the last paragraph to be as uninteresting as the rest of the book. I put it in the give-away section of my apartment building. Maybe someone else will find the plumb in this book. I never did.

In the early 1980s in Bombay, classically trained by his father Apura Lal, Shyam is in demand by the affluent to tutor them or their offspring in voice. Shyam has come a long way from his famous father who sang only traditional classics while he teaches singing popular tunes mostly to wealthy women.

One of his better students Mallika Sengupta asks Shyam for a secret favor. She resents having to give up her chance for a musical career to marry a corporate exec so she wants to give her sixteen years old son Nirmalya a chance to make it in music. Shyam agrees to work with the rebellious Nirmalya , but the teen does not want to work with the teacher he scorns for selling out his soul for a few rupees; in fact the lad admires Apura for adhering to the classics; Nirmalya's preference.

This is an interesting look at Bombay through the eyes of two families (representing three generations) as music connects everyone. The story line is vivid with the sound of music, but the obvious conflict between parent and offspring feels muted. Still, in spite of the toning down of the clash, fans will enjoy this stylish refrain as "the magic is in the music and the music is in me" (Lovin' Spoonful) and you; just the preference differs.

Harriet Klausner

But I found it incredibly confusing to keep up with what was going on. Maybe the language is beautiful, but if you can't really follow the story, it's not much good.