Reviews for A new world

The average rating for A new world based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-05-10 00:00:00 Enrico Maria Albamonte A book that is perhaps as challenging to review - and by review I mean judge - as it was to write. Chaudhari's restraint is stifling at times; his minimalist narrator divulges little; and the reader, while understanding the rationale of the repose of the novel, invariably ends up asking for a little let-go. But apart from the fettering of the narrator, there is something more structural that one may also decipher and unequivocally cede to the writer: the dexterity of design inherent in the inception of this novel. 'A New World', if one looks finely, is a feat of literature, really - one that will not blow you away, but tend to you with sleep-inducing, sultry caresses - like the pre-monsoon weather of the city of Calcutta that it so obliquely yet aptly describes. Chaudhary reads like a mixture of Joyce and Woolf and, a tad bemusingly, Naipaul. The details, as in the consciousness of Jayojit Chaterjee - the divorcee from America who is spending a vacation at his parents' house in Calcutta with his son, vacation-rights with whom he has recently won in a court battle with his deviant wife - are the meat of the novel. His somnambulant views of the irrelevant and unimportant happening and meetings and objects are pretty much all there is to this book. But there is a blended hint of post-colonialism, of East meets West, of the complexity of filial obligations. And like an undercurrent below all of that, there is the paricular treatment of the content with a linguistic certainty that faintly resembles the wand of the great 19th century novelists - more specifically, their twentieth century embodiment in Naipaul. Chaudhary, while invoking memories of many masters of yore, adroitly avoids getting clubbed with any one in particular. His voice is original, and his subjects, as uninteresting as they are; and his plots, as sub-plot like as they are; are nevertheless a direction for the novel that is - quite surprisingly by the end of the book - very novel indeed. 'A New World' ails from a fuzzy ineptitude in realistically chanelling the content of conversations, but even that passes along, for Chaudhary convinces you with his abstruse development of characters to such degrees, that after a time you understand and accept the fact that his characters - bound by relations of blood as they are - have nothing to say to each other, except sharing the banalities of every day life. In this way, even the deficiencies in Chaudhary's writing seem to work in his favour, which is predominantly due to the choice of plot and setting. There is realism here, but it is a somnambulist realism, which serves the purpose of justifying most of what Chaudhari does in this book. Many reviewers have blamed Chaudhary of giving us nothing in his novels. But Chaudhary's work, as one intelligent reviewer noted, is not the stuff of novels, but of what might happen between novels. By doing so, it fills a space in modern literature, and questions, knowingly or unknowingly, the Jamesian notion of the 'interesting' requirement being imposed on this art form. A novel - if a definition was to be winnowed from Chaudhari - can be a celebration of language; can be a somnolescent drifting away of life, captured in words; can be an evasion from the heart-wrenching emotions that surround its characters. A novel, certainly, can also be defined by what it is not. And for sensitizing us to this interpretation, Chaudhari deserves an emphatic thumbs-up.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-07-28 00:00:00 Miguel Franscio Sorry, this book just did not work for me...though the author's voice was lucid, the book meanders into nothing.....thoroughly disappointed. I am not one to put too much emphasis on plot points in a tale. Character development and a sense of connect with the reader is of vital importance though. I have LOVED books where pretty much nothing happens, which is a true reflection of the daily mundane life...where pretty much nothing happens. But the beauty lies in the details, which was completely missing here...an insightful look into the main character's psyche during this phase of transitioning in his life would have made for a compelling read, but the author seems content with a mere gaze. The book droned on and on and in the end I was left with, well, nothing:(