Author: Amit Chaudhuri
Publisher: Picador India
Year: 2002
Language: English
Pages: 184
ISBN/UPC (if available): 033049130X
Description
In these wry, lyrical stories, men, women, children, and even gods try to maintain their dignity and make sense of their lives, amid the jostling loneliness and cultural upheaval of post-post-Independence India.
Whether it's an embarrassed schoolboy standing up to the tyranny of disco, a conventional housewife inspired to write her memoirs, a businessman attending memorial rites for a young suicide, or two divorcees about to enter into an arranged marriage, the portraits that Chaudhuri draws from India's new middle class are studies in heartbreaking awkwardness and hard-won grace.
This brilliantly nuanced first story-collection, which rangers over thirty years of Indian life, confirms Amit Chadhuri's reputation as one of the best prose writers of his generation.
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR THE BOOK
Chaudhuri's stories have a wonderful quietness, depth and accuracy. There is no better writer of the human particulars and subtleties of modern Indian life.
- Ian Jack
With Amit Chaudhuri we are in the sparsely populated country of the utterly first rate. Real Time is written with starkness, clarity and authority, but still has lyrical heat. Reading Chaudhuri is like drinking fresh cold water on the hottest of days.
- Jim Harrison.
Contents
STORIES
Portrait of an Artist
Four Days Before the Saturday Night Social
The Man from Khurda District
Beyond Translation
The Great Game
Real Time
Prelude to an Autobiography:
A Fragment
The Second Marriage
Words, Silences
The Party
Confession of a Sacrifice
The Old Masters
An Infatuation
The Wedding
White Lies
E-MINOR
E-Minor
Chasing a Poet: Epilogue
Note