Incompleteness

Essays on everything from the music of Joni Mitchell to the declining quality of Bengali food from one of India’s preeminent writers.

“I’m an Indian, so of course I write about India. But then, again, I don’t write about India. I’m not interested in writing about India. This means I’m not entirely, or comfortably, a part of the history of the Indian novel in English either. Nor can I be part of a history that’s now been appropriated by literary journalism and publishing houses: of the form of the novel. It’s not that I’m resistant to appropriation. I’m unfit for appropriation. This may be a good place to be in.”

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, Incompleteness is incontrovertible proof that Chaudhuri is one of our most original and gifted interpreters of the world after globalisation."This collection spanning 25 years includes a remarkable variety of subjects and is written in a variety of styles, from the personal to the academic . . . Chaudhuri is skeptical, alert, often trenchant, allergic to cant but occasionally taken with jargon in this lucid, surprising, and illuminating collection." —Michael Autrey, Booklist

"In [his] essays breadth of knowledge and the fluency of thought are held in perfect balance...compendious, quietly passionate, rigorous, and unfailingly eloquent." —Geoff Dyer

"[A] spirit of elusiveness animates his new collection, appropriately titled Incompleteness, which brings together essays on a wide array of subjects, from classical Hindustani music to Joni Mitchell to the intersection of the sacred, the secular, and the literary." —Apoorva Tadepalli, The Baffler

"Puts in question the key terms of self-understanding of much modern literature...a treasure trove of acute and thought-provoking perceptions." —Charles Taylor

"A formidable intelligence at work....Puncturing intellectual pieties and lazy thinking, [his essays] challenge us to rethink how art and the world connect." —Rita FelskiAmit Chaudhuri is a novelist, essayist, poet, and musician. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he lives in Calcutta and the United Kingdom. He has written eight novels, the latest of which is Sojourn. Among his other works are three books of essays, including The Origins of Dislike; a study of D.H. Lawrence's poetry; a book of short stories, Real Time; two works of nonfiction, including Finding the Raga; and four volumes of poetry. Formerly a professor of contemporary literature at the University of East Anglia, Chaudhuri is now a professor of creative writing and the director of the Centre for the Creative and the Critical at Ashoka University, as well as the editor of literaryactivism.com. He has made several recordings of Indian classical and experimental music, and has been awarded the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, the Lost Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, the Indian government's Sahitya Akademi Award, and the James Tait Black Prize.