Château Rouge - by Amit Chaudhuri (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A meditative and fragmentary novel about a writer invited to a residency in Paris, where he sublets an apartment in the Château Rouge area--an experience that eventually leads him to a newly expansive attitude toward the city.

I was beginning to feel it would be best not to settle down in areas recognisably Parisian, because places recognisably themselves tend to be fictitious.

A writer is invited to Paris and finds himself living in an area that bears little resemblance to his idea of the city. With the passing of time, his disquiet translates into a way of seeking and experiencing a truer, more unlikely Paris.

Château Rouge takes up residence in that area before floating freely through the city. It takes its time, exploring tangents, diversions, side streets, creeping into new spaces and remote angles, to open up fresh ground and appraise the city, the experience of travel, otherness--and the novel itself--anew.

Review Quotes

"Château Rouge is a true romance. Chaudhuri's Paris beguiles precisely by refusing to seek approval, to charm, to conform to expectations. And the same is true of this graceful novel, so stubbornly, surprisingly, gorgeously itself. On these uncharted streets and pages, a peculiar magic starts to happen. I don't quite know how he's done it--but I love it." --Clare Carlisle

"With each of his novels, Amit Chaudhuri has managed to reinvent himself without ever compromising the essential pleasures of his fiction, which collapses every possible distinction between interiority and description and transforms the act of contemplation into high drama. In Château Rouge, Chaudhuri again delivers something beautiful and new. A richly textured novel that decenters Paris even as it pays careful attention to the way the city looks and feels today--right now--Château Rouge unites city symphony, psychogeography, and psychological acuity as only Chaudhuri can. I've loved Chaudhuri's writing for years, but thanks to Château Rouge I've discovered new altitudes of admiration." --Mark Krotov

"[Château Rouge] dwells on brief contacts in the Paris that is not the City of Light but rather a city of immigrants who live and work around the metro stop, Château Rouge . . . It is a novel in fragments, assembled from glimpses, an eternal present of sensations, culture discernible in what the eyes and ears find arresting." --Michael Autrey, Booklist

"Chaudhuri delights in writing about the quotidian and discovering unexpected associations between people and things . . . this unconventional, non-linear work offers an intriguing mosaic of the prosaic and the profound." --Lucy Popescu, Financial Times

"[Chaudhuri's] perceptions are a lesson in how to see a place as it is, rather than as you want it to be . . . An often drily humorous meditation on place, time, memory and history, Château Rouge is an elegant, thoughtful, and intriguing piece of work." --Rosemary Goring, The Herald (Scotland)

"A lissome, formally confident novel that comfortably shifts between introspection and action . . . . In Château Rouge, time unfolds as a succession of small, sensuous pleasures." --Annabel Rice, Literary Review (UK)

"[Château Rouge is] a flâneur's tale, or a play on that idea, much of it being given over to what feel like brief, semi-connected jottings from wanderings through the streets of Paris."
--Michael Caines, TLS

"[Chaudhuri's] very measured, almost poetic prose, which evokes more than it narrates, and the austere economy of his novels, which are one fourth the size of an average Indian novel, make him distinctive: here is a painter not of large and garish Indian murals, but of portraits in miniature of everyday life." --Pankaj Mishra, The New York Review of Books

"Chaudhuri has only one of the novelist's qualifications, but he has it in abundance . . . he is in love with life, and with people, and he can communicate this love directly and unsentimentally. Nothing is too small or too boring for him: he defamiliarises the everyday, reinvigorates the ordinary, and makes the humdrum seem exciting." --Jonathan Coe, London Review of Books

About the Author

Amit Chaudhuri is a novelist, essayist, poet, and musician. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he lives in India. He has written eight novels, the latest of which is Sojourn. Among his other works are books of essays, including Incompleteness: New and Selected Essays, 1999-2023; a study of D. H. Lawrence's poetry; a book of short stories, Real Time; two works of nonfiction, including Finding the Raga; and several 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 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, the Indian government's Sahitya Akademi Award, and the James Tait Black Prize.