Freedom Song

By Amit Chaudhuri

1999

First Published

3.44

Average Rating

205

Number of Pages

6H15M

Audio Length

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, and A Strange and Sublime Address Chaudhuri illuminates the surprisingly nuanced intimate worlds of middle-class Indian men, women, and children. The novels brim with the author's 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.

Avg Rating

3.44

Number of Ratings

333

5 STARS

16%

4 STARS

31%

3 STARS

38%

2 STARS

12%

1 STARS

goodreads

Author

Amit Chaudhuri

Author · 16 books

Amit Chaudhuri was born in Calcutta in 1962, and grew up in Bombay. He read English at University College, London, where he took his BA with First Class Honours, and completed his doctorate on critical theory and the poetry of D.H. Lawrence at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was a Dervorguilla Scholar. He was Creative Arts Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford, from 1992-95, and Leverhulme Special Research Fellow at the Faculty of English, Cambridge University, until April 1999, where he taught the Commonwealth and International Literatures paper of the English Tripos. He was on the faculty of the School of the Arts, Columbia University, for the Fall semester, 2002. He was appointed Samuel Fischer Guest Professor of Literature at Free University, Berlin, for the winter term 2005. He is now Professor in Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia. He was made Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2009.