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Calcutta Two Years in the City Amit Chaudhuri 9780307270245 Books

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Calcutta Two Years in the City Amit Chaudhuri 9780307270245 Books

First of all, Chaudhuri writes fantastically well--great vocabulary, great connections between disparate things, great turn of phrase. Obviously, he's erudite; but, he doesn't push this at you. ( Seems just a natural part of his being.)

This memoir is a very personal journey back to Calcutta on Chaudhuri's part. ( Some reviewers have said it's too personal. I don't think so.) You won't find this a "guide" to the city. It's not meant to be. It's a "guide" to the author's heart-- as though you're sitting in the room with him listening to him gently talking. Chaudhuri knows this. We learn about his wife, his parents, his extended family, his childhood haunts, favorite restaurants, favorite semi-crumbling parts of the city. In the course of this, we meet street people, chefs in the burgeoning cafe and business society, even maids and his elderly Father's care giver. He says that Calcutta is about people and shows us this. (Bombay is about money and Delhi is about government, he states.)

Yes, we hear of the suffocating humidity and the need to escape it by living in England. And, we get a more clear picture of the author, an only child returning to this heat and rain- to Calcutta- to take care of his Father
but only partially so. He's also taking care of himself by reconnecting to his past and sorting out his future in this not quite globalized city.


Tags : Calcutta: Two Years in the City [Amit Chaudhuri] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. The award-winning author Amit Chaudhuri has been widely praised for the beauty and subtle power of his writing and for the ways in which he makes “place” as complex a character as his men and women. Now he brings these gifts to a spellbinding amalgam of memoir,Amit Chaudhuri,Calcutta: Two Years in the City,Knopf,0307270246,Asia - India & South Asia,Personal Memoirs,Kolkata (India);Description and travel.,1962-,Biography,Biography & Autobiography Personal Memoirs,Chaudhuri, Amit,,DESCRIPTION AND TRAVEL,GENERAL,General Adult,History,History Asia India & South Asia,HistoryWorld,History: World,Homes,Homes and haunts,India,Kolkata,Kolkata (India),Non-Fiction,Travel Asia India & South Asia,United States

Calcutta Two Years in the City Amit Chaudhuri 9780307270245 Books Reviews

The author introduces the reader to a wide range of Calcutta's characters here - from street stall owners to chefs in fancy hotels - from his family members to Mamata Banarjee, the woman who presented an alternative to the Communist/Maoist Party that had so long prevailed in the area.

Unfortunately, these individuals often get lost in a maze of run-on sentences crammed with subordinate clauses. Chaudhuri seems to be aiming at an imitation of Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past." He ostentatiously lets every observation trigger a stream of consciousness in him, flowing back and forth and around - from Bombay where he was born, to present-day Calcutta, to the Calcutta of his youth, to Oxford and Norwich where he studies/teaches in England. He is impressed by his own presumed ability to notice every detail and to imbue it with import.

Reading "Calcutta" is like watching a loom whose shuttle has gone tilt. The result is something that might have been meant as a tapestry, but that ends up being more of a crazy quilt.

This kind of undisciplined style could be forgiven if the writer made up for it with a generally likeable, engaging persona. But Chaudhuri doesn't endear himself. He comes across as taking too superior an attitude. This is evident as he goes rather pointlessly from poll to poll on election day, asking voters if they think the election "will change things." He makes it clear all these contacts are interview subjects, to be harvested for their answers and then left behind. There's also his revealing reference to his wife, who is only identified as "R" in the body of the book. Chaudhuri starts one long reflection by saying, "By the time I married R..." A more inclusive, loving person would have referred to "the day we got married."

One passage will serve to illustrate these difficulties with the book. Chaudhuri finally gets around to visiting his mother's oldest friend, who is dying in a not-too-distant town. Chaudhuri launches off - "Shobhabazar is in North Calcutta; so the narrow lane in which Mini mashi and her elder sister lived doggedly in a government flat, a five-minute walk from Tagores' house in Jorasanko, two minutes from Mallickbari or the marble Palace, and not far at all from Mahajati Sadan, the playhouse; an area as littered with the relics of history as Shobhabazar is thriving (besides still being home to the obscure mansions of erstwhile rajas and landlords) with stalls selling wedding cards, saris, dress material - but predominantly wedding cards."

Then in the next sentences, he justifies not having visited Mini mashi sooner by pointing out that his own home is in the more industrially progressive southern part of Calcutta. So the voyage up north always loomed for him as involving "pushing in the opposite direction, of bracing myself to travel against the current." This is an odd, abstractly inhumane reason for not visiting a friend.

The topics Chaudhuri chooses to notice also seem a little too eccentric. He writes about the players and cheerleaders being imported from other countries to make up the newly popular football games in India. But he doesn't mention much about the poverty there. He writes about the difficulties Italian chefs face getting Calcutta citizens to appreciate "al dente" food. But he doesn't mention much about the ecology of the area. He talks about how delightful Christmastime in Calcutta is, but says little about water shortages or pollution.

Perhaps though, the obliqueness of Chaudhuri's observations is a good thing. The book certainly doesn't present the stereotypical picture of India as a teaming, steaming, impoverished country. It puts India in general, and Calcutta in particular, in a whole new light, as a place of unexpected daily details.

There are tigers of forceful ideas that will spring out at you from the undergrowth of this book. You're likely to find some reflective gems amid the slough of verbiage. Because of all its convoluted, padded sentences, this is a hard book to skim through in order to find such treasure though. You pretty much either have to commit yourself to reading the book thoroughly, or else forego it altogether. On balance, I`d say you'd be better off for the reading of it. It will take you along a different sort of passage to India.
Literature detail of Calcutta vs. travelogue. Calcutta is a fascinating city and Amit does a good job of capture it's essence in this novel.
I don't know why others liked it so much. He rambles on and on, jumping from one topic to the next in a stream of consciousness narrative. I couldn't finish it, it was that bad. The only benefit to reading this book is if you're planning to visit Calcutta. Otherwise, don't bother.
I have read a good bit about India and enjoyed the experience.
The memories in this book are very personal and detailed and,
at least for me, are hard to get into. It is almost as if I
were with an uncle who went on and on, saying we did this and
we did that. It does not hold together.
In between his reminiscences of present and past, he makes us miss what we never knew, makes us want to know that whether the life is better now or was it in the past days through his anecdotes of bygone days of the Calcutta. Only the last two chapters ('Study Leave' and 'A Visit') are less engaging and are more like ramblings of an old man. It feels like that they are there for just space occupation, a desperate try to fulfil some pre-set targets.
First of all, Chaudhuri writes fantastically well--great vocabulary, great connections between disparate things, great turn of phrase. Obviously, he's erudite; but, he doesn't push this at you. ( Seems just a natural part of his being.)

This memoir is a very personal journey back to Calcutta on Chaudhuri's part. ( Some reviewers have said it's too personal. I don't think so.) You won't find this a "guide" to the city. It's not meant to be. It's a "guide" to the author's heart-- as though you're sitting in the room with him listening to him gently talking. Chaudhuri knows this. We learn about his wife, his parents, his extended family, his childhood haunts, favorite restaurants, favorite semi-crumbling parts of the city. In the course of this, we meet street people, chefs in the burgeoning cafe and business society, even maids and his elderly Father's care giver. He says that Calcutta is about people and shows us this. (Bombay is about money and Delhi is about government, he states.)

Yes, we hear of the suffocating humidity and the need to escape it by living in England. And, we get a more clear picture of the author, an only child returning to this heat and rain- to Calcutta- to take care of his Father
but only partially so. He's also taking care of himself by reconnecting to his past and sorting out his future in this not quite globalized city.