Books
“Calcutta: Two Years in the City” (306 pages; $25.95) by Amit Chaudhuri; published by Alfred A. Knopf (aaknopf.cm)
If you have read Amit Chaudhuri’s “The Immortals” or “Freedom Song,” you don’t want to miss out on “Calcutta,” which as the title says, explores two years in the city of the award-winning writer’s birth. Walk along with the author as he passes by vibrant avenues, derelict alleyways, historic restaurants and shops as well as the malls and hotels of the 21st century in this memoir. You get a feel of and for the one-time capital of India (till 1911) as Chaudhuri meets up with Marxists, street vendors, domestic workers, intellectuals, members of the dwindling haute bourgeoisie, etc. “Anyway, if Calcutta today suffers in comparison, it’s not really to other cities, but principally to itself and what it used to be,” he writes. “Anyone who has an idea of what Calcutta once was will find that vanished Calcutta the single most insurmountable obstacle to understanding, or sympathising with, the city today.” Clear and precise, Chaudhuri pulls no punches in creating a warm and glowing picture of the city that has so much history to offer … and more!
“The Lives of Others: A Novel” (516 pages; $26.95) by Neel Mukherjee; published by W.W. Norton & Company (www.wwnorton.com)
So what if the author didn’t win the recently-announced Man Booker Prize though he was on the shortlist? The London-based Neel Mukherjee is brilliant, vivid, compassionate and quite musical in his portrayal of Calcutta 1967. The book highlights an aging patriarch and matriarch of the Ghosh family whose five adult children and household each occupies a floor of the ancestral home. Despite the physical separation, there is anguish and rivalry in the family. To make matters worse, the eldest Ghosh grandchild joins an extremist political group. A master of description, Mukherjee writes, “The blue sky is dotted sparsely with cottony white clouds. Children are on holiday and the skeleton of the puja pandal – a wondrous structure made of bamboo and planks and coir ropes and colored cloth, stretched and ruched and concertinaed across the bones of bamboo, covering them decoratively in furls and drapes – has already been constructed in the piece of land that abuts the Durga temple of 23 Pally.” This one’s a keeper, folks.