Amit Chaudhuri
The award-winning author Amit Chaudhuri has been widely praised for the beauty and subtle power of his writing and for the ways in which he makes â€œplaceâ€ as complex a character as his men and women. Now he brings these gifts to a spellbinding amalgam of memoir, reportage, and history in this intimate, luminous portrait of Calcutta. , Chaudhuri guides us through the city where he was born, the home he loved as a child, the setting of his acclaimed novelsâ€”a place he now finds captivating for all the ways it has, and, perhaps more powerfully, has not, changed. He shows us a city relatively untouched by the currents of globalization but possessed of a â€œself-renewing way of seeing, of inhabiting space, of apprehending life.â€ He takes us along vibrant avenues and derelict alleyways; introduces us to intellectuals, Marxists, members of the declining haute bourgeoisie, street vendors, domestic workers; brings to life the cityâ€™s sounds and smells, its architecture, its traditional shops and restaurants, new malls and hotels. And, using the historic elections of 2011 as a fulcrum, Chaudhuri looks back to the nineteenth century, when the city burst with a new vitality, and toward the politics of the present, finding a city â€œstill not recovered from historyâ€ yet possessed of a singular modernity., Chaudhuri observes and writes about Calcutta with rare candor and clarity, making graspable the complex, ultimately ineluctable reasons for his passionate attachment to the place and its people.Â 
Cultural,India,Nonfiction,Travel,Autobiography,Memoir,Biography Memoir,History,Asian Literature,Indian Literature,Geography,Cities,Cultural,Asia,Cultural
Calcutta: Two Years in the City