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The award-winning author of A New World now gives us an incantatory novel—at once plaintive and comic—about the powerful undercurrent of cultural and familial tradition in a society enthralled with the future.
Bombay in the 1980s: Shyam Lal is a highly regarded voice teacher, trained by his father in the classical idiom but happily engaged in teaching the more popular songs to well-to-do women, whose modern way of life he covets. Sixteen-year-old Nirmalya Sengupta is the romantically rebellious scion of an affluent family who wants only to study Indian classical music. With a little push from Nirmalya's mother (Shyam's prize pupil), Shyam agrees to accept Nirmalya as his student, entering into a relationship that will have unexpected and lasting consequences in both their lives. As the novel unfolds, we see how their two families come to challenge and change each other, and how student and teacher slowly mesh their differing visions of the world, and what place music holds in it.
With exquisite sensuous detail, with quiet humor, generosity, and unsentimental poignancy, The Immortals gives us a luminous portrait of the spiritual and emotional force of a revered Indian tradition, of two fundamentally different but intricately intertwined families, and of a society choosing between the old and the new.
| Price | Condition | Delivery | Seller | Action |
| $99.99 | Digital |
| WonderClub |
Marco Hartog
reviewed The Immortals on September 16, 2011
The Immortals
'The Immortals' seems to have been written for the Booker judging panel, meticulously adopting one of the standard Booker styles: Indian subcontinent coming-of-age family saga (known for short as the Rushdie Template).
Unfortunately it wasn't written for you, dear reader, so I advise you not to read it.
Amazon reviewers are occasionally castigated for 'spoiling': giving away the plot of a book. There is no danger of that here because 'The Immortals' has no plot. Or, if it does have one, it is simply this: talented singer marries a businessman. He is successful but she never gives up singing. They have a son. He acquires an interest in music. He leaves home. It takes 400 pages for these non-events to happen.
Chaudhuri is a talented writer but novel-writing is not abstract art. There is more to it than simply delivering several hundred thousand lovely words.
He also tries to provide 'flavour' by peppering the text with Indian words and phrases that are meaningless to the non-Indian reader and cannot be understood from the context, making the first 100 pages hard to understand without a phrasebook. Perhaps he thinks English readers are too riven with guilt about the Raj to complain. This is patronising at best or plain bad manners at worst.
Possibly there are readers who can enjoy a book simply for the beauty of its prose and the lushness of its description of people and places.
If this is you, then I strongly urge you to buy this gorgeous piece of literary show-boating.
If this is NOT you, then I strongly urge you to avoid this self-indulgent piece of literary onanism.
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