Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Freedom Song is neither about liberty nor a melodic tune. Rather it is an immense, three-novel-in-one, 433 page tome stuffed with picaresque glimpses of life in modern India and Oxford...
...readers with a short attention span, Chaudhuri offers paragraph-long summaries of each novel at the beginning of the text. Completely eliminating the entertainment value of the plot, this is his way of deterring thrill seekers in search of an action-packed sizzler. He cultivates a reading audience willing to linger and savor the sensations he painstakingly recreates. This is a man in love with language. Each of his sentences is a work of art, making it clear that it's the arrangement of syllables and not the plot that matters to Chaudhuri...
...Strange and Sublime Addressa boy from Bombay visits his uncle's house in Calcutta for his summer vacation. The most enjoyable novel of the three, Address captures a 12-year old's ability to delight in the mundane with a narrative that manages to be at once child-like and worldly. A walk through town becomes a symphony of fragrance and image. The boy's naivete is amusingly depicted during a lazy afternoon when the boy regards a pigeon mating ritual as something akin to a World Wrestling Federation grudge match...
...readers fascinated with the South Asian culture, this read is vastly more enjoyable than the standard history text. Chaudhuri demystifies Indian exoticisms, transporting us into his rag-tag world where everything revolves around the late afternoon nap. This novel's evocative imagery is on par with Indian director Saityjit Rays' films in de-cloaking the mysterious world of the subcontinent...
...contrast to the Indian focus of the first novel,Afternoon Raagis a collection of suspiciously autobiographical sketches taken from student life at Oxford. Whatever plot might have strung the biographical snippets of this together has been lost under chapter upon chapter of description...