Episode 14 - Amit Chaudhuri Part 2

The second part of my chat with Amit Chaudhuri began with a discussion of his literary inheritance - that combined Philip Larkin with Tagore. 

From there we headed towards Bengali culture and onwards to: 

• Ideas of 'ownership' of culture - Bengali and English
• English conceptions of India and 'Asia'
• class in India and England
• finding your voice as a writer
• discovering that your subject is 'the rhythms of the everyday' 
• 'What you see on the street, from a window, a balcony...Maybe even the toilet and the bath as private spaces where you achieve certain kind of movements...'
• the influence of Ulysses - for and against
• a Portrait of Chaudhuri of a Young (Tolstory and Joyce) Reader
• 'I suddenly realised that Tolstoy's way was not going to be my way'
• reading, writing and daydreaming
• looking, place and translation - Dublin and Calcutta
• falling love with DH Lawrence - 'the everyday was always being transformed'
• the problems of plot
• memoir v autobiographical fiction
• 'I am not in any conventional way interested in autobiography'
• stories and repetition 
• further thoughts on Joyce and the 'joy in the provisional'
• writing as an act of memorialisation 
• 'For me, more alive means all the inconsequential, random things that make up our lives'
• Homer - Odysseus meets his son
• was writing Odysseus Abroad cathartic in any way
• Chaudhuri as musician

And with that, pretty much, Chaudhuri's taxi arrived. For James Wood's review in The New Yorker, click here.