Amber Dusk- Reviews of the Book

Reviews of Rajat Chaudhuri's first novel - Amber Dusk. 

Reviews, notices, citations, honours for the novel Amber Dusk:

The Telegraph
Indian Literature (Sahitya Akademi journal, May-June 2008) (Review)
Review by Prof Amitava Roy (Shakespeare Professor of English, Rabindra Bharati University)
JSTOR
NDTV
The Statesman
The Hindu
Deccan Herald (review, 3rd Feb, 2008)
Deccan Herald (notice)
Canon and Identity in IWE (Citation, Paper by Prof Niranjan Mohanty, Vishwa Bharati University)
Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Dec 2008 (Citation)
The Asian Age
The Echo of India
Pre-release reviews
Vodafone Crossword Book Awards Longlist

(Click on the above links to read the reviews. More reviews will be added as they appear)

Amber Dusk - A citation in a paper on `canon' and `identity' in IWE

Prof Niranjan Mohanty, Head of the Department of English at Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan recently presented a paper on canon and identity in Indian Writing in English, wherein he cited and quoted from Amber Dusk. The paper was presented as part of a keynote address delivered by Prof Mohanty at Loreto College, Darjeeling. The relevant excerpt from Prof Mohanty's paper is given below.

Excerpt from the paper `Contextualizing the questions on “canon” and “identity” in Indian Writing in English' by Prof Niranjan Mohanty:

I would like to conclude this paper by citing from a young fiction writer of Kolkata, Rajat Chaudhuri. His debut novel Amber Dusk (Delhi: Indialog Publication Pvt. Ltd, 2007) represents a psychedelic collage of myth and memory. It is a novel in which Kolkata and Paris figure luxuriatingly, creating a different verve, a striking sense of pulsation, bedecked by intricate moon-moments of love and intimacy. I shall cite here only those lines out of the many, in which Chaudhuri captures the rhythmic beauty of Kolkata life ridden with politics:

That night the government of the State of West Bengal was also working overtime. At the solid looking red –brick Writers Building from where the state is governed there was an urgent meeting of powerful ministers. The sweet makers were going on a day’s token strike. All sweet shops in Calcutta and all over the state would remain closed on Sunday. If the government did not budge, and went ahead with the new law, then this would be followed by continuous strikes. The Ruling Reds were jittery at the news. They knew that if the Bengalis were parted from their mistis, sweet, anything in the world –even the most absurd and unimaginable –would happen. (25-26).

I believe, even if young, Chaudhuri has successfully represented the state politics in West Bengal and the sweet-loving attitude of the Bengalis. There are certain things in life which do not go away and these certain things contain and constitute one’s identity, the substance or essences of one’s identity, whether these belong to what Ramanujan calls “outer” or “inner” forms and what I call ‘circles’ the ‘concentric circles’ that define, project and represent one’s identity.

The full text of the above paper is available here.

Copyright notice: The copyright for the paper `Contextualizing the questions on “canon” and “identity” in Indian Writing in English' belongs to Prof Niranjan Mohanty and any organisation to which he may have temporarily vested this right. All rights reserved.

Calcutta Streets

Calcutta streets are a cauldron of emotions. This photograph is from the Esplanede area where some group is organising a demonstration. Street protests, demonstrations, processions are the bread and butter of Calcutta life and comes back again and again in the pages of Amber Dusk.

Parc de la Villette

Someone took this snap of mine at the Parc de la Villette in Paris. This park, a master design of Bernard Tschumi is a must visit for lovers of architecture and design and was built over a huge slaughterhouse in this area. Paris is an abiding theme and setting for Amber Dusk.

Lake Malren

Lake Malaren of Stockholm is at the heart of the novel. I had taken this photograph of Malaren one chilly evening sitting on the deck of the barge restaurant-The Ludwigschafen. Don't ask me what camera...

Jacket Designs

This is an early jacket design for the book. At that point the novel seems to have a different title! Many different versions of this design were tried but finally the quality of the image was not good enough. I took this photograph of a whirling dervish (coloured red) at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. The woman in the foreground was in the audience.

Amber Dusk - A pre-release review by Amitava Roy

AMBER DUSK smells of Calcutta streets and resonates with the seductive tunes of Parisian nights. Robot oracles, the enigmatic photographer Valence Jourdain, a shadowy Blue Princess, Indian tribesmen and the mystical Lake Malaren colour this fascinating narrative, creating an edgy reality. The novel presents a rich tapestry of ideas weaving together Calcutta and Paris and the lives and passions of the unforgettable individuals that walk their streets. Here is a delicately crafted story about love, loathing and beatitude and the quest for peace in a time of intolerance.

`Rajat Chaudhuri's Amber Dusk is a multi-levelled exploration of Love and other forms of Death where reality  mixes and mingles with hyper , super , virtual  and surrealities to leave the reader breathless. A global cast of identifiable yet strange and sublime characters  common saints, santhals, socialites and terrorists, pimps, prostitutes and gays, projectors and dreamers, actors, artists and astrologers, animated robots, talking birds and toys, prophets, revolutionaries, utopians, millenarians all flit across the dreamscapes of the protagonist Rishi's several lives and multiple forays into alternate worlds and times as the reader is taken on a vertiginious roller-coaster ride across cultures and continents. Calcutta is at the heart of this Quest Novel cum Bildungsroman cum psychedelic collage of Myth and Memory as Rishi  the central character  hunts for life's meaning with his lovers and antagonists that takes him finally to Stockholm's Lake Malaren (equi-significant to our own Manassarovar) and back to Kolkata following epiphanies and illuminations that take us through the Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

The title itself reveals the sensuous apperceptions and the inventive imagination of the author who creates images of Beauty and its evanescence almost on every page of this novel. Amber Dusk resonates with echoes from at least a triple pun  dusk falling around `Amber', a famed restaurant in the heart of Kolkata; golden sunsets fading and slipping into dusky twilight; and ``the cow-dust hour'' or ``godhuli lagna'' the most propitious time for marriage and romance when the Radhas and Krishnas of the world must set out on their glorious quests amidst the gathering gloom.

A big, ambitious first novel on the Liebestod theme mapping out multiple existentialist journeys and border-crossings that should create both ripples and waves among its international readership. A memorable novel of East-West encounter.’— Amitava Roy, Shakespeare Professor of English and Drama, Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata

Amber Dusk – About the book

This is from the back cover:

AMBER DUSK smells of Calcutta streets and resonates with the seductive tunes of Parisian nights. Robot oracles, the enigmatic photographer Valence Jourdain, a shadowy Blue Princess, Indian tribesmen and the mystical Lake Malaren colour this fascinating narrative, creating an edgy reality. The novel presents a rich tapestry of ideas weaving together Calcutta and Paris and the lives and passions of the unforgettable individuals that walk their streets. Here is a delicately crafted story about love, loathing and beatitude and the quest for peace in a time of intolerance.

Gypsy Mug - The dedications page of Amber Dusk

Amber Dusk is dedicated to this coffee mug. The mug once belonged to a Gypsy. This Don Williams song goes out to her, wherever she may be now.

Amber Dusk – Where I began

Ten or more years ago the famous Bengali author Sunil Gangopadhyay had a long travelogue serialised in the Calcutta daily, Anandabazar Patrika. If I remember correctly the title of that travelogue was Chobir Deshe Kobitar Deshe, a simple translation of which would be – In the Land of Painting and Poetry. The travelogue was about his journeys in France, the people he met there, the culture, the colours, the associations with literature and art. It used to be published on Sundays and I preserved every clipping. At this time, I was drifting among strange professions, celebrating that lightness, spooked to my bones by a future which seemed dangerously predictable. I was discovering Calcutta with young poets and painters - roaming her streets at night, arguing with zealous policemen about the right to remain drunk for ever, sparring (a bit bookishly) with friends about artists and art. I was also doing a bit of writing (book reviews, middles and stuff), some of it in newspapers like the The Statesman and The Telegraph. That was when the idea of a novel came to my mind and I immediately filled fifty pages with thoughts that were still unprepared to be words. But then I lost my way and life intervened with its bag of tricks. The project did not take off again till much later, when I was in the midst of a responsible but exciting job in a non-government organisation. I was travelling a lot; to France, America and other places. And the routines of that job, somehow, bred in me a discipline of writing regularly. That helped. I used to harbour an innocent admiration for the French and their country. Some of it may have come to me from literature, some perhaps from my first French teacher Eric Blandin at Alliance Française de Calcutta. When Jacques Derrida came to speak at the Calcutta book fair, Eric presented me with a photo of the linguist and a book on French philosophers. And Sunil Gangopadhyay’s delicious prose had already cast its spell. By then I knew what my book would be about.

© Rajat Chaudhuri. All rights reserved