Incompleteness : new and selected essays, 1999-2023 / Amit Chaudhuri.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Chaudhuri, Amit, 1962- Author.

Language:

English

Genre:

Essays.

Physical Description:

357 pages : 22 cm

Place of Publication:

New York, NY : The New York Review of Books, [2025]

Summary:

"Essays on everything from the music of Joni Mitchell to the declining quality of Bengali food from one of India's preeminent writers. 'I'm an Indian, so of course I write about India. But then, again, I don't write about India. I'm not interested in writing about India. This means I'm not entirely, or comfortably, a part of the history of the Indian novel in English either. Nor can I be part of a history that's now been appropriated by literary journalism and publishing houses: of the form of the novel. It's not that I'm resistant to appropriation. I'm unfit for appropriation. This may be a good place to be in.' A brilliant prose stylist and keen innovator of literary form, Amit Chaudhuri is one of the most singular voices in contemporary letters whose essays, like his fiction, defy categorization and display a sensibility uniquely his own. Incompleteness gathers some of Chaudhuri's best essays and criticism from more than two decades. In these pieces, Chaudhuri writes on everything from Rabindranath Tagore and Joni Mitchell to the troubles with Indian modernity, from the humble yet delicious snack mix chanachur to globalisation's appropriation of narrative storytelling over poetic incompleteness. Drolly humorous, and filled with unexpected insight, Incompleteness is incontrovertible proof that Chaudhuri is one of our most original and gifted interpreters of the world after globalisation"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Tagore and the superfluous: an excerpt from the Introduction to Clearing a space

In the waiting-room of history: on Provincializing Europe

The flute of modernity

The East as a career

Huge baggy monsters

Two giant brothers

Notes on the novel after globalisation

Arun Kolatkar and the tradition of loitering

Learning to write: VS Naipaul, vernacular artist

A feather! A very feather upon the face!: on Kipling

Women in love as post-human essay

Beyond confidence: Rushdie and the creation myth of Indian English writing

The check list: excerpt from the introduction to The origins of dislike

The origins of dislike

The piazza and the car park

Poetry as polemic

On the Gita: Krishna as poetic language

The alien face of cosmopolitanism: an Indian reading of Cynthia Ozick on the Woolfs

Ray and Ghatak and other filmmaking pairs: the structure of Asian modernity

Nissim Ezekiel: poet of a minor literature

On the paragraph

I am Ramu

Storytelling and forgetfulness

Why I write novels

German sequence

Changing planes

Cowboys and Indians

As good as none

Close-ups in Hindi films

The Decline of Bengali food

Money matters

The tailor of Gujarat

A small Bengal, NW3

A strange likeness: Walter Benjamin

The real meaning of Rhodes must fall

Where does the time go?: on Joni Mitchell

Two floors above the butcher

Other Format:

Online version Chaudhuri, Amit, 1962- Incompleteness

ISBN:

9781681379654

1681379651

OCLC:

1528903609