Here are some thoughts after reading Amit Chaudhuri's first novel, A Strange and Sublime Address, which I read in the collection Freedom Song (which is what the page numbers below reference). I struggled with Chaudhuri — his goals for fiction are not mine. Nonetheless, I found it to be a productive struggle, and enjoyed writing about the book for a seminar on postcolonial fiction from Southeast Asia.
Over the next few days, I'll be posting here some of the material I came up with during that seminar that I doubt I'm going to develop into something more polished, at least immediately, but which seems worth preserving, even if my ideas are based on false premises, misreadings, or other potential pitfalls of quick apprehension...
ASSEMBLING THE INSTANT OF THE CITY
He did not know what to
do with his unexpected knowledge. But he felt a slight, almost negligible,
twinge of pleasure, as meaning took birth in his mind, and died the next
instant. (117)
Here we have the protagonist, Sandeep, discovering the pleasure of meaning
in a word and name (“Alpana”), but the moment could be extended to the novel as
a whole and, in particular, its perspective on the city of Calcutta. If we
accept Majumdar’s proposal that this novel presents a flaneur’s-eye-view of life
and the city, then the cityscape of the novel is less a stable conglomeration
of stone and steel than it is an ever-flowing multiplicity of sensations. It is
a place full of objects, but the objects live in constant moments of being, and
those moments of being are created within the perceptions of the people who
come in contact with them. Thus, there is no one object, no one city; rather,
there is a practically infinite field of encounters, and those encounters erupt
and fall into memory within the space of an instant.
