Elizabeth Hardwick’s Collected Essays. Her insights, though recorded during times so different from our era of unrepentant celebration and moral vigilantism, feel unsparingly true, and are expressed with musicality. To choose one at random: “A genius may indeed go to his grave unread, but he will hardly have gone to it upraised. Sweet, bland commendations fall everywhere upon the scene.” For the present age, we should add “awards” to “commendations”.
Since life is change, how to claim that it changes at one moment and not another? All the “life-changing” books I read as a teenager I have forgotten. Books advertised as “life-changing” I avoid as I would a new vitamin or holiday package. There are books, poems, and essays that have opened my eyes though. DH Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers made me see that great themes are of secondary importance to the writer; what is of primary interest is the accident of existence. “Nothing is important but life,” he said in “Why the Novel Matters”, and Sons and Lovers is for me the first modern work that declares this unapologetically. The great critical essays in Tom Paulin’s Minotaur: Poetry and the Nation-State were published at a time when critical theory seemed to have invalidated an aesthetic response to writing. Paulin’s essays showed us with revelatory force how literary pleasure and political energy were enmeshed with each other. Finally, I have in mind Rabindranath Tagore’s essay on Bengali nursery rhymes, written in 1895, probably the first expression of modernism anywhere, in which he uses Bengali words for ‘stream of consciousness’ and argues that Bengali nursery rhymes accommodate random associations in a way that linear adult thinking doesn’t.
When I was 17 I thought Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was pretentious. At 24 I thought it astonishing
The book that had the greatest influence on me
So many were key to my rediscovery of the city of Calcutta, with its provincial mysteries and wayward cosmopolitans – the subject of my first novel. Being in England at the time, I couldn’t find Calcutta in Calcutta itself. I had to find it in books. Those books included Sons and Lovers, Katherine Mansfield’s Collected Stories, VS Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas, Elizabeth Bishop’s Questions of Travel, and various others.
The book I think is most underrated
All literatures outside western ones are wilfully underrated, even if they are among the most creative literary traditions in the world. Even when we’re aware of them, we see them as part of a history of ethnicity rather than of literature. The fact that we hardly know who Jibanananda Das is – he was one of the greatest and most original poets of the 20th century – is a case in point. His Naked Lonely Hand and Bengal the Beautiful are available in English translation by Joe Winter.
The book that changed my mind
I read James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man when I was 17 and thought it was pretentious and boring. I reread it when I was 24 and thought it was astonishing. It may not have changed my mind, but it made me realise that reading involves changing your mind.
The book I wish I’d written
Any book whose title I adore, or whose jacket holds me in thrall, but which I haven’t got round to reading is a book that I’ve begun to bring into existence. One of the reasons I never get round to reading that book, but keep rereading the title or studying the cover, is because I don’t want the actual work to impede the work I’m imagining. This is partly how my last novel, Friend of My Youth, came to be. I loved the title of the Alice Munro story so much that I kept deferring reading it. I never thought that one day I’d write it myself.
The last book that made me cry
I can’t recall. It must have been a poem, and it must have been joyous. I don’t know if this counts, but that whole sequence in Ritwik Ghatak’s film Komal Gandhar, in which a character is singing “akash bhara surja tara” (“the sky full of stars and sun, / the world full of life”), brought tears to my eyes. So did, long ago, the last pages of A House for Mr Biswas, when Anand receives his father Mr Biswas’s letter: “It was a letter full of delights.”
The last book that made me laugh
The collected English writings of the great 20th- century Bengali-language writer Buddhadeva Bose have just been published. I should declare an interest: I wrote the preface. Rereading it, I find myself smiling at various things. Here is the opening sentence of ‘To Remember is to Live Again’, his essay on meeting Henry Miller in America: “There was a time when I was marooned in a women’s college in Pittsburgh.”
The book I’m most ashamed not to have read
Some of the really terrific books I’m asked to write endorsements for and don’t have time to look at.
My earliest reading memory
Ladybird books. I had no English at five, and the headteacher of my school in Bombay advised my mother to give me Ladybird and comic books. Both were terrific to read.
• Amit Chaudhuri’s Friend of My Youth is published in paperback by Faber.
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