The second part of my chat with Amit Chaudhuri began with a discussion of his literary inheritance - that combined Philip Larkin with Tagore.
----more----From there we headed towards Bengali culture and onwards to:
- Ideas of 'ownership' of culture - Bengali and English
- English conceptions of India and 'Asia'
- class in India and England
- finding your voice as a writer
- discovering that your subject is 'the rhythms of the everyday'
- 'What you see on the street, from a window, a balcony...Maybe even the toilet and the bath as private spaces where you achieve certain kind of movements...'
- the influence of Ulysses - for and against
- a Portrait of Chaudhuri of a Young (Tolstory and Joyce) Reader
- 'I suddenly realised that Tolstoy's way was not going to be my way'
- reading, writing and daydreaming
- looking, place and translation - Dublin and Calcutta
- falling love with DH Lawrence - 'the everyday was always being transformed'
- the problems of plot
- memoir v autobiographical fiction
- 'I am not in any conventional way interested in autobiography'
- stories and repetition
- further thoughts on Joyce and the 'joy in the provisional'
- writing as an act of memorialisation
- 'For me, more alive means all the inconsequential, random things that make up our lives'
- Homer - Odysseus meets his son
- was writing Odysseus Abroad cathartic in any way
- Chaudhuri as musician
And with that, pretty much, Chaudhuri's taxi arrived. For James Wood's review in The New Yorker, click
here.
