Product Description

Shyamji has music in his blood, for his father was the acclaimed 'heavenly singer' and guru, Ram Lal. But Shyam Lal is not his father, and knows he never will be. Mallika Sengupta's voice could have made her famous, but being the wife of a successful businessman is a full-time occupation in itself. Mallika's son, Nirmalya, believes in suffering for his art, and for him, all compromise is failure: those with talent should be true to that talent. No matter what.

Written in haunting, melodic prose, The Immortals tells the story -- or stories -- of Shyam, Mallika and Nirmalya: their relationships, their lives, their music. More than that, though, it is also the story of music itself, of music as art, and an exploration of its place in the modern world of money and commerce.

'Among the literary voices from India to have made themselves heard in this country over the past ten years, Amit Chaudhuri's is one of the most immpressive: beautifully balanced, affecting, truthful' Sunday Telegraph

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #214023 in Books
• Published on: 2009-03-20
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

Review
'If the Man Booker Prize ran to form, we could begin to draw up the shortlist for 2009... The Immortals?' --Boyd Tonkin, The Independent

Review
'Asian fiction continues to make a big splash; Amit Chaudhuri's The Immortals is a tale of three Indian musicians.'

Review
'Chaudhuri's fifth novel follows the paths of three musicians and examines the complicated relationship between music and money.'

Customer Reviews

That's all well and good, but where's the plot?
This book is well written, very well written. Which makes me feel quite bad about having to admit how little I enjoyed it. What you find is a group of characters, serendipitously tied together by the theme of music or through some family tie, but who don't really offer much in the way of interest to the reader. There are a few stories, but no underlying plot. The narrative essentially takes you nowhere, leaving you feeling frustrated and bored.

Novels can sometimes be good despite a lack of obvious plot, but generally you need characters who can carry it, or some kind of amazing theme. As opposed to ones you couldn't care less about, and a somewhat unexplored theme. It even makes music feel dull.

Once again the prose is nice, but, honestly, read something else.

Clever but ultimately unsatisfying
The Immortals is a novel set in the heart of the world of the Bombay middle class: music teacher Shyamji, son of an acclaimed musician, enters the lives of the bored and affluent Senguptas. What happens? It's hard to say. With great attention to detail Chaudhuri paints each character with a careful but not always sensitive brush - middle-aged wife Mallika is a frustrated singer; teenage son Nirmalya is disaffected and irritatingly interested in philosophy in a superficial way; the father of the house is one-dimensional in his suit, tie and air-conditioned white Mercedes.

Stephen Abell wrote in the Telegraph that it is a novel of 'the mortal and the mundane', which I think is a very good way of putting it and sums up much of the feel of this book.

It is hard to say what is wrong with The Immortals but something just doesn't work as it should, at least for me as a reader. It is a finely crafted piece of work in many ways and well-written, though I found the use of Hindi and Bengali phrases throughout a bit frustrating as these didn't always sit well within the English narrative and it wasn't always clear what these meant or why Chaudhuri had chosen to use Hindi rather than English. For me, they added little to the novel but were sometimes frustrating.

At a higher level, throughout the novel I found myself getting increasingly frustrated with the lack of progression. Yes, characters died or moved - but essentially there was no movement whatsoever in the core of the book; the aspects that the book centred around. Maybe that was the point and maybe it was very clever, but I found the lack of any pace or resolution unsatisfying.

Singing the wrong kind of solo
'The Immortals' is already being touted for the Booker Prize, and with good reason. It was clearly written for the Booker judging panel, meticulously adopting one of the standard Booker styles: Indian subcontinent coming-of-age family saga (known for short as the Rushdie Template).

Unfortunately it wasn't written for you, dear reader, so I advise you not to read it.

Amazon reviewers are occasionally castigated for 'spoiling': giving away the plot of a book. There is no danger of that here because 'The Immortals' has no plot. Or, if it does have one, it is simply this: talented singer marries a businessman. He is successful but she never gives up singing. They have a son. He acquires an interest in music. He leaves home. It takes 400 pages for these non-events to happen.

Chaudhuri is a talented writer but novel-writing is not abstract art. There is more to it than simply delivering several hundred thousand lovely words.

He also tries to provide 'flavour' by peppering the text with Indian words and phrases that are meaningless to the non-Indian reader and cannot be understood from the context, making the first 100 pages hard to understand without a phrasebook. Perhaps he thinks English readers are too riven with guilt about the Raj to complain. This is patronising at best or plain bad manners at worst.

Possibly there are readers who can enjoy a book simply for the beauty of its prose and the lushness of its description of people and places.

If this is you, then I strongly urge you to buy this gorgeous piece of literary show-boating.

If this is NOT you, then I strongly urge you to avoid this self-indulgent piece of literary onanism.