Afternoon Raag
charuseelan (2201065)
charuseelan (2201065)
Amit Chaudhuri is the author of five highly acclaimed novels, of which A Strange and Sublime Address, Afternoon Raag, Freedom Song, and A New World won, between them, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, the Betty Trask Prize, the Encore Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, and the Sahitya Akademi Award; his latest novel is The Immortals. He is also a poet, an acclaimed musician, and a highly regarded critic, and has edited The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia. Amit Chaudhuri lives in Calcutta and Norwich.
This immensely subtle novel both estranges and gently strokes the surface of English and Indian life. I know of nothing in English fiction that begins to resemble it' Tom Paulin"Those who are always acclaiming the "poetic prose" of Ondaatje would do well to study Chaudhuri's language' James Wood'Enchanting, studded with moments of beauty more arresting than anything to be found in a hundred busier and more excitable narratives ... Nothing is too small or 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, in her choice of her top 10 short novels, Guardian'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 and Society"The sort of unclassifiable prose work or "text" produced by poets. 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
The doorbell rings. The music-teacher comes in.He is smiling as usual. His body is smiling. He is humming a complicated tune outside, wind, light and rain revolve the landscape in a shifting treadmill of shadow. Inside, in the cool room, my mother and the music-teacher sit on the carpet, as usual, enclosed, in the drawing-room, by sofas and tables and paintings and curios.My mother plays the harmonium; she begins to sing.Her fingers on the black and white keys make, of her hand, a temple with many doors. When the music-teacher joins in intermittently, he shows what a strange thing thehuman voice is, this tiny instrument in the throat, with its hidden universe of notes, its delicate, inscrutable laws.
A raag, spacious as the mansion the rain builds, enfolds and sighs, like one of the elements.Inside the great architecture of the raag, through the clear archway of notes, world without humans,two figures sit, each alone my mother and the music-teacher-enclosed by sofas and paintings and curios.The music teacher is listless today. He does not respond.My mother is just a little irritated as she sings, but she is afraid, too, of something she does not understand.
The music-teacher has merged with the sofa behind him, momentarily indistinguishable from the soft, indifferent contours of the furniture, with the disturbing patience and resignation of furniture. His wife, his widowed mother, his brother, his brother-in-law, his sister, his four children,the jewelled constellation that appeared at his birth, are moving away from him. He is alone, sitting on the carpet, leaning his back against the sofa.