Ramanujan
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Ramanujan

Ramanujan

By
Amit Chaudhuri (Author)  

Paperback

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In these poems, written after the death of his parents, Amit Chaudhuri gives us both a record of loss and an account of tasting life afresh. Here, past and future are often conjoined, as are moments, people, and sounds: Ramanujan the mathematician and Chaudhuri, related as much by Cambridge as they are to each other by their suffering bodies; absent parents echoed by the daughter absent during home-cooked meals; a 9th-century Chinese poet and Sybille Bedford finding a reader in Chaudhuri, who himself addresses a 'Reader' who belongs to both past and future; the first day of the year with its 'cough cough' rhythm echoed by the 'tatak tatak' of the dhak on Durga puja; two mothers, one American, in Kaddish, the other an Indian maid with a face disfigured by burns; the 'human and God touching faces nose to nose'. Moving through this world - Chaudhuri's universe - now annotated by bereavement, one cannot not be infected, again, by the wonder and newness with which he experiences the world: that, even after living and all these lives, 'I never felt I knew the place'. "The spirit of the Indian mathematician Ramanujan, a "strange misfit" in Cambridge, hovers over this mercurial collection that dwells deftly on empire and migration, on the solidity of architecture and the fugitive particularity of food. All of it testifies to an "appetite for existence" and an omnivorous richness of perception." -Jamie McKendrick
Amit Chaudhuri is the author of seven novels, including, most recently, Friend of My Youth, as well as a work of non-fiction, Calcutta, and collections of short stories, essays, and a critical study of D. H. Lawrence's poetry. He has two previous books of poetry: St Cyril Road and Sweet Shop. He has received the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Betty Trask Award, the Encore Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Sahitya Akademi Award, among other accolades. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an honorary fellow of the Modern Language Association in America. Chaudhuri is Professor of Creative Writing at Ashoka University. Alongside this, he is a singer in the North Indian classical tradition and a composer and performer in a celebrated project that brings together the raga, blues and jazz with a variety of other musical traditions. He is the editor of literaryactivism.com.
  • Contributor: Amit Chaudhuri
  • Imprint: Shearsman Books
  • ISBN13: 9781848617384
  • Number of Pages: 108
  • Packaged Dimensions: 140x216x7mm
  • Packaged Weight: 149
  • Format: Paperback
  • Publisher: Shearsman Books
  • Release Date: 2021-05-31
  • Binding: Paperback / softback
  • Biography: Amit Chaudhuri is the author of seven novels, including, most recently, Friend of My Youth, as well as a work of non-fiction, Calcutta, and collections of short stories, essays, and a critical study of D. H. Lawrence's poetry. He has two previous books of poetry: St Cyril Road and Sweet Shop. He has received the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Betty Trask Award, the Encore Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Sahitya Akademi Award, among other accolades. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an honorary fellow of the Modern Language Association in America. Chaudhuri is Professor of Creative Writing at Ashoka University. Alongside this, he is a singer in the North Indian classical tradition and a composer and performer in a celebrated project that brings together the raga, blues and jazz with a variety of other musical traditions. He is the editor of literaryactivism.com.

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