Afternoon Raag

Afternoon Raag, by Amit Chaudhuri, is one of those novels that unselfconsciously blurs the lines between poetry and prose. Chaudhuri's evocative writing – his ability to exalt even the most ordinary details – conjures up the moods of a place and an era in each of the small, everyday scenes he depicts. Although it's not specifically autobiographical, the novel follows a young man of Indian (Bengali) origin, studying at Oxford in the 1980s: a path very similar to Chaudhuri's own. Amid rich depictions of student life and the backroads of Oxford, Chaudhuri scatters reminiscences of Calcutta and Bombay, and his parents' household.

Perhaps it's not surprising, then, that the downfall of this book is its lack of a compelling storyline. The show more book is short (130 small pages) and the emphasis is more on a series of musings or impressions, than on the plot. Still, although the chronology is loose, the book maintains direction – and a sort of narrative arc – until the last chapter, which suddenly devolves into a character sketch of a minor character, bookended by a few scraps of memories. It left me disappointed and crashing back to earth after what felt like a mini holiday to a couple of exotic lands.

For all that, the book was a good read. I was enthralled by the surreal world of Oxford seen through the eyes of its Commonwealth students that Chaudhuri spun into almost-reality in front of my eyes. Throughout the book, his landscapes are tinged with the sense of a timeless and yet fragile age about to come to an end.

Chaudhuri writes: "Within the college walls there is a world – a geography and a weather – that clings to its own time and definition and is changed by no one. In this world, glimpsed briefly by the passer-by through the open doorway, a certain light and space and greyness of the stone, and at night, a certain balance of lamplight, stone, and darkness, co-exist almost eternally, and it is the students, with their nationalities and individual features, their different voices and accents, their different habits and attempts at adjustment, their sense of bathos and possession of reality, who, in truth, vanish, are strangely neglected, so that, when the passer-by later remembers what he saw, the students seem blurred, colorful, accidental, even touching, but constantly skirting the edge of his vision, while it is possible to clearly and unequivocally recall the dignity and silence of the doorway and the world behind it." As Chaudhuri's protagonists mourns and anticipates his departure from Oxford, he's also mourning the fact that, in the 1980s, neither his beloved Oxford nor his native India will stay the same for very much longer – when his parents move into a new, 'modern,' apartment building, or when his friend Sharma takes up word-processing instead of a typewriter, you can feel the twinges of a world beginning to crumble. That poignancy, and those glimpses into a world that will never quite exist again, make the book worth reading at least once, if not again and again. show less

This second novel by Chaudhuri consists of short vignettes about the narrator's life as a university student at Oxford, intertwined with ones about his middle class family in Bombay and Calcutta. The descriptions of his friends and two girlfriends in Oxford and street life in Bombay are entertaining, but became a bit tiresome in the second half of the book, as I wanted to learn more about these characters and the narrator. This was a quick and mildly enjoyable read, but not a memorable one.