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the complete review - fiction

Chowringhee

by
Sankar

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B : entertaining, period-revealing hotel novel

See our review for fuller assessment.

  Review Consensus:

  Maybe a bit dated in some respects, but generally think it's a wonderful evocation of time and place

  From the Reviews:

• "(I)n place of the novel's predictable contrivances and cardboard characters, I found myself yearning for the brilliant subtleties within the crumbling Majestic hotel in J. G. Farrell's Troubles. Chowringhee has similarly high aims, but is hamstrung by cloying sentimentality and hyperbole from the first page (...) and a familiar Victorian misogyny, where women are either pitiable whores or saintly mothers." - The Economist
  
  
• "(A) lovely, charming book brimming with life and full of the unexpectedness of a closely observed world. Everything comes to the old hotel, either to the sumptuous guest rooms or to the terrace where the staff live. Love and death are never far away. Sankar writes of both simply and movingly. There will be many grateful readers at his table." - Romesh Gunesekera, The Guardian
  
  
• "The style of writing is crisp and fast paced, sometimes even reportage-style, which makes for a gripping read. There is no flowery language, neither long philosophical discourses. The characters and situations speak for themselves." - Ranjita Biswas, The Hindu
  
  
• "Brick by brick, tale by tale, Chowringhee builds up into a panoramic and utterly captivating picture of a workplace, a city and an era. (...) Like some late-arriving round of burra pegs after hours at the hotel bar, Arunava Sinha's translation, both fruity and spicy, tastes all the better for the wait. This old-fashioned feast of storytelling crawls with character, heaves with drama and bursts with flavour." - Boyd Tonkin, The Independent
  
  
• "Sankar manipulates a huge cast of colourful characters. (...) Strung between these ways of telling, Chowringhee ends up having no plot, in the Forsterian or Jamesian sense of the term; what we have instead is a collection of stories -- some discrete, some tumbling and interlinked, all mediated, in different degrees, by Shankar. On the surface, Chowringhee appears to be an impeccably cosmopolitan novel. Its setting and concerns are urban; its characters are a heterogeneous lot, culturally, racially, socially, economically; it is intensely anchored in a very real, and realistically evoked, Calcutta, the text replete with names of streets, shops, businesses, landmarks, parks, monuments and statues. But as the novel progresses, it seems to undermine its own cosmopolitanism with a kind of narrative overdetermination." - Neel Mukherjee, The National
  
  
• "Arunava Sinha’s Indian-accented English translation reads smoothly. (...) Sankar displays a strong moral sense shaped by his early grounding in the system of law and justice." - Andrew M. Brown, Times Literary Supplement
  
  
• "In this beautifully translated book, the author illustrates the myriad shades of human nature. Be it deceit, treachery, love, lust, frustration, jealousy, this book has just about everything. But at the same time all these form a part of the narrative effortlessly, without drawing attention away from the story line, rather offsetting it." - Aditi Garg, The Tribune

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Chowringhee is narrated by (the somewhat confusingly named) Shankar. He lost his promising job as the: "last clerk of the last English barrister of the Calcutta High Court" when his employer died, but a private detective he had come to know at the law-offices helps him out, getting him a position at the Shahjahan Hotel -- "a class apart" even among the city's finest establishments:

It was incomparable. It wasn't so much a building as a mini township., The width of the corridors would put many roads, streets and even avenues to shame.

Really, what an interesting job you have. You get to meet so many different kinds of people ... now I understand why English novels are so absorbing when they're set in hotels.

     The world had become much smaller these days, an enormous mass of land named China having been wiped off the cabaret map.

     Kurt had never heard of such a thing in his life. 'You mean to say you're completely dry for a whole day ?' he exclaimed. 'You deliberately cripple normal life in India for a day ? And you mean to tell me that your country is going to start an industrial revolution in this manner, with leftover ideas from the last century ?'

Don't you know the yardstick of modern civilization ? In today's world man is measured by his bank account and a woman by her figure: 36-22-34, 34-20-34

- M.A.Orthofer, 21 July 2014

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Links:

• Penguin Books India publicity page
• Atlantic Books publicity page
• Gallimard publicity page
• Neri Pozza publicity page
• Seix Barral publicity page
• Profile in The Hindu

• The Book Lovers
• The Guardian
• The Hindu
• El Imparcial (Spanish)
• The Independent
• India Today
• The National
• Open
• Outlook Traveller
• El Placer de la Lectura (Spanish)
• Sowmyawrites....
• The Tribune

• IMDb page

• See Index of Indian and Bangla literature

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About the Author:

       Bengali author Sankar (শংকর) -- actually: Mani Shankar Mukherjee (মণিশংকর মুখোপাধ্যায়) -- was born in 1933.

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© 2014-2022 the complete review

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