What most immediately galvanizes the reader ofFreedom Songis the elegance and idiosyncrasy of Amit Chaudhuri's writing. In the words of Salman Rushdie: "[His] languorous, elliptical, beautiful prose is impressively impossible to place in any category at all." And it is this quality of ineffability that gives Chaudhuri's words the power they have to reveal--slowly, quietly, with a richness of sensual detail and subtle humor--the significance of the ordinary moments of life. A boy spends a summer and a winter with his parents in a Bombay high-rise, and spends other summers in Calcutta immersed in the more traditional life of his uncle's extended family . . . A young man at Oxford, whose memories of home in Bombay bring both comfort and melancholy, faces a choice between "clinging to my Indianness, or letting it go, between being nostalgic or looking toward the future". . . The members of a Calcutta family are occupied with the task of finding the right woman for the twenty-eight-year-old son who would rather occupy himself with politics . . . In these three short novels--Freedom Song, Afternoon Raag,andA Strange and Sublime Address("The best portrait of India today I've read," wrote Margaret Drabble)--Chaudhuri illuminates the surprisingly nuanced intimate worlds of middle-class Indian men, women, and children. The novels brim with the author's stunning evocations of place and time, and his radiant descriptions and subtle explorations of the expected and surprising events of daily life; the effects of family connectedness and separation; the desires and demands of youth and age; the things and events that confirm "how mysterious the world [is] at every moment"; the hidden complexities of a fully lived inner life. From these elements Amit Chaudhuri shapes mesmerizing narratives, uncovering the remarkable in what might otherwise seem merely quotidian. Freedom Songis the work of a writer--published here for the first time in the United States--possessed of an extraordinary gift. Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.

Attended by its watchful, intuitive handmaiden‘the laudable Chaudhuri, in his first U.S. publication‘the English idiom emerges new-skinned and crying healthily in the humid air and shuttered rooms of Calcutta and Bombay. Collected in one volume, a primer on Chaudhuri's remarkable sui generis prose, these three modern, postcolonial novels poise their characters delicately between the ebb of the future and the flow of the past. This tension is often dramatized by the characters' use of the English tongue. A Strange and Sublime Address (1991) tells of the Bombay-bred Sandeep who aspires to be an English writer and, at 10 years old, already uses such words as "tentative," "gingerly" and "enthusiastic." Morning piles on midday, which builds to evening (or "cow dust" as the Bengali word means literally) as Sandeep spends his school holiday with his poorer and less educated cousins in Calcutta. In their house, and in Chaudhuri's nostalgic gaze, routine is elevated to ritual. The uncle's shaving and the aunts' application of "kumkum powder in the parting of their hair" are sacred arts; the sound of bangles clinking, rattling keys and "dervishing" fans are hymnals in the domestic temple. The North Indian protagonist of Afternoon Raag (1993), like Chaudhuri himself once did, studies English literature at Oxford. Far from home, and deeply immersed in the transporting lines of Lawrence's poems, he remembers vividly scenes from his childhood and the traditional music he played with his now-dead guru. "The raags," he says, "woven together, are a history, a map, a calendar, of northern India..." The simultaneous affairs the narrator carries on with two Indian girls‘one skinny and one plump‘provide a framework for his recollections and perfume the book with heady dormroom love. The final novel in the trio, Freedom Song, is a work of greater length and complexity than the preceding two; in it Chaudhuri hits the full stride of his mature voice. Dwelling longer on characterization, he examines the intricacies and contradictions of middle-class life in Calcutta through the relationships of one extended family. Bhaskar, a son more thin and dark than his mother wishes him, has compromised his chances of making a good match by joining the Communist Party and a street theater troupe. Bhaskar's Aunt Khuku and her friend Mimi winter out their late years in an intimate conspiracy of shawl-shrouded, tea-drinking gossip and political conversation. What may frustrate readers of the first two novels‘that Chaudhuri seems to chronicle events as they occur to him, and pushes the stories to their ends by the thin connectives "one time" and "the next day"‘gives way here to a more deliberate plotting that is nonetheless charmingly concerned with the behavior of Calcuttan pigeons and the rain-damp laundry on the line. (Mar.) FYI: A Strange and Sublime Sadness won the 1991 Betty Trask Award and the Commonwealth Writers Prize, and Afternoon Raag won two prizes, in Britain. From: Reed Elsevier Inc. Copyright Reed Business Information

This collection of three novels is Chaudhuri's first publication in this country. Set in Bombay and Calcutta and written in a quiet, meditative style, the novels reveal the intricacies of family life, providing the reader with insightful observation and very little directly related dialog. We see into the characters' thoughts but only from the narrator's perspective, as if we were looking through a window in the ceilings of the rooms where the action takes place. A Strange and Sublime Address describes a small boy from Bombay and his visit to relatives in Calcutta. In Afternoon Raag, a young Indian man, a graduate student at Oxford, reflects on his parents, his recently deceased music teacher, and the two women with whom he has become involved. Finally, Freedom Song follows two related families in Calcutta during a time of religious and political upheaval. These novels are distinguished by their peaceful and poetic tone. Highly recommended for both public and academic libraries.‘Rebecca A. Stuhr, Grinnell Coll. Libs., IA From: Reed Elsevier Inc. Copyright Reed Business Information

Amit Chaudhuri, author of three previous novels, has won several awards for his writing. A contributor to the "London Review of Books," the "Times Literary Supplement," & "The New Yorker," he lives with his wife & daughter in Calcutta. Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.

Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.