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The Immortals

The Immortals

by Amit Chaudhuri, introduction by Pankaj Mishra

$19.95
$19.95
Available as E-Book International Literature
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Bombay in the 1980s: Shyam Lal is a highly regarded voice teacher, trained in the classical idiom but happily teaching more popular songs to well-to-do women, whose modern way of life he covets. Sixteen-year-old Nirmalya Sengupta is the rebellious scion of an affluent family who wants only to study Indian classical music. With a little push from her mother, Shyam agrees to accept Nirmalya as his student, entering into a relationship that will have unexpected and lasting consequences.

With quiet humor and unsentimental poignancy, The Immortals is a luminous portrait of the spiritual and emotional force of a revered Indian tradition, of two fundamentally different but intricately intertwined families, and of a society choosing between the old and the new.

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9781681379678
Pages: 400
Publication Date:

Praise

Masterful.... While lesser writers obsess over the heat and dust, Chaudhuri charts the by-ways of the Indian soul.... Capacious, multi-faceted but intimate, The Immortals is Indian to the core but universal in its implications.... Superb.
—The Independent

The lyrical quality of [Chaudhuri’s] writing is striking. The imagery is vivid, the humour deliciously oblique.... It invites honourable comparison with Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks.
—The Times (UK)

Chaudhuri’s characters linger in the mind; and his prose, with its exactness and elegance, its exquisite delineation of memory and emotion, has a strange, mesmerising grace.
—Financial Times

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