Rational Miracles

Three of Amit Chaudhuri’s novels, A Strange and Sublime Address, Freedom Song, and Afternoon Raag, reprinted by NYRB Classics Reissues, were recently reviewed by Saikat Majumdar for the Los Angeles Review of Books.

“For many readers, the enchantment of the first two novels remains one of the most unique and identifiable elements of Chaudhuri’s fiction. For me, that enchantment lies in the magic of Chaudhuri’s language, the application of the deeply sensory idiom of English modernism to the quotidian texture of provincial life in Calcutta. I found these books at a moment when I’d been searching for my own tradition as an Indian writer, still poised unpredictably between Bengali and English—one a language of the restless, throbbing movement of life around me, the other of a deep and dreamy absorption in books from faraway lands.”

Read more here.