Jayojit, a semi-successful writer, now divorced, has finally retrieved his son Bonny for his summer holidays. They are leaving their home in the American Midwest and going back to Calcutta, to his grandparents, the Admiral and his wife. A New World watches Jayojit and his son as they share the dark, close flat with his parents while the city outside is blanketed in fierce summer heat. Amit Chaudhuri delineates with breathtaking delicacy the details of married lives -- of an elderly couple entrenched in the unquestioning roles of their past and of a modern marriage now sharply severed in two. 'He has as much of life in each of his books as many of his contemporaries will capture in a career ...reading some of these passages, you can be reminded of reading Joyce's Dubliners for the first time, where every sentence can seem a small act of beauty' Tim Adams, Observer
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A relatively inconsequential plot provides the armature for Amit Chaudhuri's A New World: Jayojit Chatterjee, a recently divorced economics professor at an American college, returns home to Calcutta for a two-month holiday with his 7-year-old son, Bonny. Here he takes up residence in his parents' flat in a modern, characterless building. At once a son and a father, at home and displaced, he deals with the minutiae of each day and thinks about his failed marriage, his parents' health, his mother's cooking, his own weight gain, the neighbors, the weather, and the hired help.
Notable for the precision of his observations, Chaudhuri recounts small telling moments of daily life with a mannerliness that avoids looking squarely at the obvious dysfunction in the Chatterjee household, while at the same time obliquely illuminating the melancholy that pervades it. Once part of colonial India's military, Jayojit's now retired parents live lives of reduced circumstances--the rhythm of their days dictated by heat, a morning walk, a trip to the bank, the daily suspense over whether the maid will appear. Proud, affectionate, but inarticulate, they express their love through offers of food and financial news. Uncomplaining, Jayojit and Bonny endure the climate and ennui, and in a marginal, temporary way participate in a world that is no longer theirs. Chaudhuri's writing, like his characters, is admirable in its restraint, as in this passage in which he describes Jayojit's first morning in Calcutta:
Jayojit had woken up late, at eleven. He had had a bath, and then changed into a shirt and shorts. Wearing shorts exposed his large fair thighs and calves, covered with smooth strands of black hair. His mother seemed to notice nothing unusual about his clothes; parents accept that offspring who live abroad will appear to them in a slightly altered incarnation, and are even disappointed if they do not.Thus formality and forbearance binds this family as much as love.
Hailed as a dazzling new talent in 1999 for Freedom Song, a collection of three novellas, Chaudhuri's remarkable accomplishment lies in the scope and complexity he paradoxically evokes in his exacting attention paid to mundane detail. --Victoria Jenkins --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Publishers Weekly
The still, shadowy languor of a sweltering Calcutta summer spent indoors suffuses this elegant but enervating novel by the author of the much-acclaimed trio of short novels, Freedom Song. Chaudhuri's protagonist, Jayojit Chatterjee, an ambitious professor at a Midwestern college, visits his native India in the wake of an ugly divorce and two abortive attempts to remarry. In Calcutta, he stays with his aging parents, his bluff father, a retired admiral, and his more traditional Bengali mother. The summer-long trip also gives him a chance to connect with his seldom-seen son and travel companion, seven-year-old Bonny, who spends the school year with his mother in California. But rather than focusing on the ravages of Jayojit's inner life and recent past, Chaudhuri avoids them, slipping the occasional flashback into the narrative while concentrating on detailsDa round of table tennis with Bonny, an orange-and-white sari, Jayojit's mother's oily breakfasts. As he demonstrated in Freedom Song, Chaudhuri has an eye for such minutiae, and his prose continues to be as rich and evocative as in his earlier effort. But while Freedom Song strung together a series of vignettes, here Chaudhuri struggles with the task of sustaining the reader's interest over the course of a full-length, albeit short, novel. The reader senses that the novel's heart is buried beneath its layers of description, but its emotional pulse proves elusive. (Oct.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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Customer Reviews
Most helpful customer reviews
Format:Hardcover
Yes, I see where the author is a very talented writer who can raise mundane, everyday experiences to a thoughtful new level. Perhaps it is my shortcoming and not his, but I need some kind of plot or a promise of a character's epiphany to keep me turning the pages. The book was set almost entirely in the apartment of the main character's parents, making it very claustrophobic. I recognize the art of the writing and the precision of the words, but I really did not enjoy reading it.
By "sgutman3"
Format:Hardcover
Amit Chaudhuri chronicles the return to Calcutta of an Indian-American who has recently been divorced. His arrival, his return to his parents' home, his re-immersion in Calcutta, his attempt to move through each unexceptional day -- all of these are the means by which this inarticulate and inadequate man tries to deal with the great crises which confront him. Those crises are, of course, the divorce and its aftermath, including his relations with the young son who joins him on this return to India; but they are as well the gap between himself and his own parents, who are of a different generation, who are aging, who do not understand the modern world and its habit of divorce.
The world is not always full of "sound and fury," as Amit Chaudhouri understands very well. Our destinies are worked out in the everyday, and we struggle as Wallace Stevens so aptly put it with "the maladies of the quotidian." It is the novel's triumph that these struggles reveal themselves beneath the everyday events Chaudhouri describes so well, and that a sense of loss and inadequacy permeates the quietly lyrical descriptions which are the substance of the novel.
By Corinna Byer
Format:Hardcover
Amit's Chaudhuri's first collection of three small novels entitled Freedom Song won him great critical acclaim and raves, even from such master stylists as Salman Rushdie over the beauty and thoughtfulness of his writing. Yes, the writing in this collection is very poetic and well-crafted, but the stories themselves never truly went anywhere. Unfortunately, his new novel A New World, suffers the same fate. The plot is a potentially revealing, touching and illuminating one, despite the fact that its same basic outlines have been used and reused in many different novels. Such a talented writer as Chaudhuri ought to be able to make something interesting and captivating out of it. In the novel, a man who has been living in the US, makes his regular visit to his parents in India with his young son, of whom he has custody for the summer. He has private regrets, of his failed marriage, of his relationship with his parents, and personal worries about his son, which of course are brought out throughout the course of the novel. His parents naturally have their own concerns and worries about him. So, in many ways this is meant to be an exploration of family bonds, of the strange feelings which accompany returning home after a long absence, of cultural collision in general.
In short, the novel's structure is a great opportunity for a writer as skilled as Chaudhuri to really make an impact, to write something about families, about parents and children that really captures an essence which everyone has felt. But, as in the case of his previous novels, this one ultimately drags and refuses to move, and a reader, no matter how much he loves Chaudhuri's prose, and wants to like the novel, will find himself yawning. The flashbacks are not coherent enough, the emotions expressed by the characters too vague to make a reader feel for them,and ultimately, which is Chaudhuri's main problem, there is no real story. It is static, and nothing,even on an emotional level, really happens. The characters, as well-written as their actions are, remain flat, distanced, and unconnected, and in the end, a reader will probably have the feeling that he has walked away from something which denied its potential and ended up empty and flat instead of rich and meaningful. If only Chaudhuri could work on his plot and character development as much as he seems to on his beautful writing style,he would indeed be among the upper echelons of our contemporary writers.
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