Chaudhuri, Amit - Incompleteness

Essays on everything from the music of Joni Mitchell to the declining quality of Bengali food from one of India’s preeminent writers. Incompleteness contains essays from previous collections by Chaudhuri along with a number of never-before-collected essays. In these essays, Chaudhuri writes about canonical figures in Indian and Anglo-Indian literature—Rabindranath Tagore, Salman Rushdie, Rudyard Kipling, etc.—along with more unexpected subjects such as Joni Mitchell and D. H. Lawrence. Chaudhuri’s voice edges toward the scholarly and theoretical but is always a congenial one—his background as a creative writing teacher is evident throughout. This collection gets its name from Chaudhuri’s idea of “incompleteness,” or “unfinishedness,” a concept that threads through these essays and consequently illuminates the philosophy behind his fiction and poetry. A brilliant prose stylist and keen innovator of literary form, Amit Chaudhuri is one of the most singular voices in contemporary letters whose essays, like his fiction, defy categorization and display a sensibility uniquely his own. Incompleteness gathers some of Chaudhuri’s best essays and criticism from more than two decades. In these pieces, Chaudhuri writes on everything from Rabindranath Tagore and Joni Mitchell to the troubles with Indian modernity, from the humble yet delicious snack mix chanachur to globalisation’s appropriation of narrative storytelling over poetic incompleteness. Drolly humorous, and filled with unexpected insight, the book is incontrovertible proof that Chaudhuri is one of our most original and gifted interpreters of the world after globalisation.