The novel, about an academic in Berlin, gives us a real-time immersion with every moment of reading
The novel, about an academic in Berlin, gives us a real-time immersion with every moment of reading
“Even today, I wonder why I write novels.” Amit Chowdhary says in his essay ‘Why I Write Novels’: “It is not to master an art which I have no desire to master, but, evidently, from my confusion with the form. To make something out.”
Since the publication of his first book, a strange and sublime address In 1991, Choudhury’s imagination showed us that “entanglement with form” can make art at least as interesting as “mastery”. Confusion can be an intense form of engagement – dislike can also be, as Choudhury has argued elsewhere. Love is not necessarily the most productive relationship to anything, nor is mastery the greatest assurance of soulful art. For Chowdhary, entanglement, or resistance to narrative realism, is his “resistance to the wind of reckoning; the air that something is over—that what you have when reading a novel is an event, or a life, as well as an artwork.” which is already over.”
Take the opening sentence of his new novel, travel, Set in Berlin: “It was evening, and I didn’t know the name of the street I was taken.” And then take the last two sentences of the book: “Lack of options, familiar parameters—I don’t question them. I’ll probably die before anything changes.” The ending, inserted in the present and possible future tenses, would have avoided repetition. is, the description of something is already finished. The opening sentence, in the past tense, can be an act of repetition, but it can also be a sentence immersed in the moment, a reflection on an ongoing experience.
narrative realism
Time, experience and reflection often occur in a continuum. But recounting Chowdhary’s main argument as modus operandi Narrative realism is truth. counting is a language Later Celebration. But Chowdhary makes a claim that is both radical and clear: that language always creates a new reality rather than reporting an existing reality, whether or not the things described are adulterated, or happened in a slightly different way – for For example, Sandeep in a strange and sublime address is physically in the house when his uncle suffers a heart attack while Chaudhary heard about it on the phone when he was of Sandeep’s age. But such deviations are not the only resistance to recalculation.
Writer Amit Chowdhary | photo credit: special arrangement
To encamp Presents a second element of truth-claim that Choudhury’s narrative usually includes: “As I am deemed ‘ordinary’, my stories are believed to be true. Why would anyone makeup An episode that doesn’t have anything funny or outrageous, a ‘story’ that doesn’t have any ‘story’?” Ordinariness is the quality that, as Choudhury points out, contestants on reality TV use when they want their Let the lies not be detected by their interrogators. An unnamed Indian writer arrives in Berlin as Ball visiting professor at an unnamed university in Berlin. A stay of a few months stops La Vi Quotidien As are expected to hold such visiting positions: lectures at the university, a quiet life in a flat in an unknown part of the city, and some bizarre social interactions and relationships – most importantly, a poet and refugee from Bangladesh. With the seeker, Fakrul Haque, and a German woman named Birgit, with whom the narrator develops a friendship.
defined by travel
Choudhury’s novels are often defined by the experience of travel, be it a short vacation or an extended stint as a student, and spatial clutter brings awareness of its surroundings. The exception in this novel is the submerged awareness of a major historical event, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the far-reaching consequences of the political disintegration of the East-West binary. History creates some experiences while it makes others impossible, such as the freedom of mind that unexpectedly comes to the narrator when he tries to define happiness: “I had something basic in my mind: Who are you? Freedom from awareness of where or where it is, which comes several times a day. Even being in a state when the thought – ‘I am in East Berlin in 1983’ – has not even formed; it occurs.”
It remains the kind of novel where the syntax of the experiential stimulus does not become what Choudhury calls “novel syntax”, the type that links events to a linear plot movement – or what Franco Moretti calls “fillers”. “, simply because the novel does not contain what Moretti also called the “turning point”. To encamp The present remains deliciously suspended, avoiding the fate of reckoning; Our true reward is that we have real-time immersion with every moment of reading. And after reaching the last sentence, we can go back to the beginning and start all over again, because no event in Choudhury’s narrative ever ends.
Migration by Amit Choudhary; Penguin Random House India; ₹499
Critics’ novels include firebird , scent of god And middle finger , @_saikatmajumdar