Amit Chaudhuri - "Friend of My Youth" - Wendy Doniger

"Friend of My Youth is a taut, efficient book: part novel and part manifesto. It presents itself as a work of fiction about friendship, the experiences of youth and the city of Mumbai, but really it’s a kind of anti-novel: a book about the failures of fiction to account for the realities of memory."—The Guardian

Amit Chaudhuri reads from and discusses Friend of My Youth. He will be joined in conversation by Wendy Doniger. A Q&A and signing will follow the event.

At the Co-op

RSVP HERE (Please note that your RSVP is requested but not required.)

About the Book: Amit Chaudhuri writes novels the way an extraordinary instrumentalist makes music, stating and restating his themes, trying them out in different keys and to various effect, developing and dropping them, only to pick them up again and turn them completely around. He engages both our minds and our hearts. He makes us marvel. Friend of My Youth, his deceptively casual and continually observant and inventive new novel, makes us see and feel the great city of Bombay while bringing us into the quizzical, tender, rueful, and reflective sensibility of its central character, Amit Chaudhuri, not to be confused, we are told, with the novelist who wrote this book.

Friend of My Youth reflects on the nature of identity, the passage of time, the experience of friendship, the indignities of youth and middle age, the lives of parents and children, and, for all the humor that seasons its pages, terror, the terror that can strike from nowhere, the terror that is a fact of daily life.

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, where he is a professor of contemporary literature at the University of East Anglia. Friend of My Youth is his seventh novel. Among Chaudhuri’s other works are three books of essays, the most recent of which is The Origins of Dislike; a study of D. H. Lawrence’s poetry; a book of short stories, Real Time; a work of nonfiction, Calcutta: Two Years in the City; and two volumes of poetry, including Sweet Shop. He has made several recordings of Indian classical and experimental music, and the awards he has received for his fiction include the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, and the Indian government’s Sahitya Akademi Award.

About the Interlocutor: Wendy Doniger [O'Flaherty] (B.A. Radcliffe, summa cum laude, Ph. D., Harvard University; D. Phil., Oxford University) has taught at Harvard, Oxford, the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, the University of California at Berkeley, and, since 1978, at the University of Chicago. She is the author of over forty books, most recently Hinduism in the Norton Anthology of World Religions, The Ring of Truth: Tales of Sex and Jewelry, Against Dharma: Dissent in the Ancient Indian Sciences of Sex and Politics, and The Donigers of Great Neck: A Mythologized Memoir. In progress are Horses in Indian Mythology and Letters from India, 1963-2018.