The Immortals - by Amit Chaudhuri (Paperback)

About the Book

"In 1980s Bombay, a highly regarded voice teacher and his affluent sixteen-year-old student enter into a relationship that will have unexpected and lasting consequences in their lives, and the lives of their families. With exquisitely sensuous detail, quiet humor, and unsentimental poignancy, Amit Chaudhuri paints a luminous portrait of the spiritual and emotional force behind a revered Indian tradition; of two fundamentally different but intricately intertwined families; and of a society choosing between the old and the new"--

Book Synopsis

Two families in 1980s Bombay--one making ends meet in the old world of Indian classical music, the other thriving in a booming new world of corporate luxury--intersect in this lyrical novel of art and commerce, capturing a city (and country) in a state of change.

Music is central to the work of Amit Chaudhuri, who is well-known as a musician and performer himself. In his brilliantly exploratory novels, character and action develop not through the conventions of plot but through the free play of paragraph, sentence, and phrase, and in The Immortals it is music that supplies the theme for a series of entrancing fictional variations. Shyamji is the scion of a celebrated Rajasthani dynasty of singers--his father, an Indian classical musician, became renowned as the "heavenly singer"--but his own sights are set on a level of material well-being his father could not achieve. In 1980s Bombay, the business capital of India, he scrapes by as a music teacher to the rich. Among his students are Mallika, the wife of a corporate executive, and her son, Nirmalya, who will embrace the cause of Indian classical music, threatened by the modern world of money, with the fanatical devotion only a sixteen-year-old can muster. Comic and lyrical, the novel is at once a Bombay novel--"the Bombay novel," as Pankaj Mishra calls it in his introducion--a story of growing up, a picture of a milieu, and a resonant tribute in kind to the most mysterious and universal of the arts.

Review Quotes

"Chaudhuri's exquisite, highly nuanced, often very funny novel...somehow took command of my thinking, my vocabulary, my sense of what's important and what should be." --Richard Ford

"Chaudhuri's characters evolve in subtle ways, through startling insights and observations....Seldom has any contemporary author invested such detail in descriptions of place, behavior, and physicality. Chaudhuri is astonishingly precise."--San Francisco Chronicle

"A writer whose fiction is as beautiful as a classical ballet." --Eileen Battersby, The Irish Times

"Masterful.... While lesser writers obsess over the heat and dust, Chaudhuri charts the by-ways of the Indian soul.... Capacious, multi-faceted but intimate, The Immortals is Indian to the core but universal in its implications.... Superb." --The Independent

"The lyrical quality of [Chaudhuri's] writing is striking. The imagery is vivid, the humour deliciously oblique.... It invites honourable comparison with Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks." --The Times (UK)

"Chaudhuri's characters linger in the mind; and his prose, with its exactness and elegance, its exquisite delineation of memory and emotion, has a strange, mesmerising grace." --Financial Times

About the Author

Amit Chaudhuri is a novelist, essayist, poet, and musician. He is a professor of creative writing and the director of the Centre for the Creative and the Critical at Ashoka University. His most recent book is Sweet Shop: New and Selected Poems, 1985-2023, published by NYRB Poets.

Pankaj Mishra is the author of Age of Anger: A History of the Present, The World After Gaza: A History, and several other books of nonfiction and fiction. Mishra won the 2024 Weston International Award, as well as the 2014 Windham-Campbell prize in Nonfiction. He writes regularly for The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, and the London Review of Books, among other publications.