`Afternoon Raag` is a semi autobiographical novel by Amit Chaudhuri. This is a first-person narration by a student about his days at Oxford. It significantly portrays his casual involvement with two female students, nostalgic memories of his parents staying in India, and his fond recall of the classical music teacher in India. This piece of work by Amit Chaudhuri is loosely structured like a Hindustani `raag`. And because of this reason this book`s prose part has gained the vigor and has the poetic feel as well.
Amit Chaudhuri was born in Calcutta in the year of 1962. He brought up in Bombay. He graduated from University College, London, and was a research student at Balliol College, Oxford. He was later Creative Arts Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford, and received the Harper Wood Studentship for English Literature and Poetry from St John`s College, Cambridge as well. He has contributed fiction, poetry and reviews to numerous publications including The Guardian, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, the New Yorker and Granta magazine. Till date the author has written four novels, a book of short stories, and edited the Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature. The Clarendon Press, Oxford, recently published D. H. Lawrence and `Difference`, his study of D.H. Lawrence`s poetry and critical theory. He has been translated into several languages and has won the Betty Trask Award, the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Encore Prize, the Southern Arts Literature Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, and also the Sahitya Akademi award. He is also a vocalist in the North Indian classical tradition.
Synopsis:
The delight of Amit Chaudhuri`s `Afternoon Raag` comes from his ability to render mental landscapes in a tight indirect prose. This is a poetic expression of the author. His idea of the novel as a collection of poetic reflections is also displayed in his sensitivity to minute detail. It also shows his ability to transform the seemingly insignificant into the matter of intense reflection. `Afternoon Raag` deals with the experiences and impressions of a young Indian student of English Literature at the university of Oxford. Chaudhuri recreates the state of mind of a young man coming to terms with loneliness, nostalgia and alienation in a unique way. A raag is a piece of classical Indian music, which plays around a set of specific intervals to create a particular mood. Here the mood recreated is one of being adrift in a unique situation, enjoying a very special phase of life between childhood and adult life, devoted to ephemeral, yet significant relationships and aesthetic pursuits.
The book `Afternoon Raag` is written by Amit Chaudhuri, which is published by Vintage and its new edition was published in the year of 1994.
