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.

About the Author

Amit 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 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.