- Hardcover: 416 pages
- Publisher: Atlantic Books (24 April 2009)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 1843549131
- ISBN-13: 978-1843549130
- Product Dimensions: 21 x 15.4 x 4 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 406,483 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Review
`[A] terrific Bengali page-turner... [A] classic of post- and pre-independence Calcutta life... Suffice to say it's an utter treat... [Chowringhee] might, to many eyes, supply more unashamed, reader-transporting enjoyment than any other fiction of the year.'
--Boyd Tonkin, Independent
--Boyd Tonkin, Independent
Review
'Given the frenetic energy and ebullience of recent fiction coming out of India, it is something of a relief to rediscover the pleasures of an absorbing story simply told. Chowringhee has that essential quality of a good novel: the capacity to escape, and help the reader escape, time. You want to turn the pages, but you do not want the pages to end. The words are fresh, and the world of the novel is completely alive, despite being written over 40 years ago... 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'
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
19 of 20 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
I was completely absorbed in this classic novel, with its sardonic wit and often irreverent banter. You feel as if you are in the Shahjahan Hotel in Calcutta's Chowringhee district listening to the anecdotes, the stories of love and laughter, the struggles and disappointments. Readers looking for a story with a beginning, a climax, and end, won't find that here. The book is sprawling and amorphous - as people come and go through the doors of the Shahjahan, so do their stories. Some tales are longer in the telling some are shorter, that does not mean some characters are more important. And just as humanity carries on,you feel there is no real end to the book.
There are the tales of those who work at the hotel, including the protagonist Shanker a hotel receptionist, the Brahmin who is so poor he has to was dirty clothes for a living, and Connie, the cabaret act, among many others. They all have their dreams and ambitions often tinged with sadness and struggle and that precisely is what makes these people so real. The hotel staff are like a large family, helping and supporting each other but even that is not enough to cheat fate. This is a book about humanity, a snapshot of a certain era, yet there is no sense that this book, first published in the 1960s, is in any way dated. As you get to know the cast of characters, you begin to identify with anyone who steps through the door of the Shahjahan Hotel.
"How many people have the good fortune of standing at the Shahjahan counter and seeing the world in this fashion," the protagonist Shanker says at one point. In fact, we have the good fortune to be standing at his shoulder as he so closely observes the lives of those around him. Written mostly as dialogue, just a little more description for those of us who do not know Calcutta would have earned this book five stars from me instead of four.
There are the tales of those who work at the hotel, including the protagonist Shanker a hotel receptionist, the Brahmin who is so poor he has to was dirty clothes for a living, and Connie, the cabaret act, among many others. They all have their dreams and ambitions often tinged with sadness and struggle and that precisely is what makes these people so real. The hotel staff are like a large family, helping and supporting each other but even that is not enough to cheat fate. This is a book about humanity, a snapshot of a certain era, yet there is no sense that this book, first published in the 1960s, is in any way dated. As you get to know the cast of characters, you begin to identify with anyone who steps through the door of the Shahjahan Hotel.
"How many people have the good fortune of standing at the Shahjahan counter and seeing the world in this fashion," the protagonist Shanker says at one point. In fact, we have the good fortune to be standing at his shoulder as he so closely observes the lives of those around him. Written mostly as dialogue, just a little more description for those of us who do not know Calcutta would have earned this book five stars from me instead of four.
2 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
It goes on a bit, and seems dated (but not like Dickens!!); a vivid picture of post-independence India. Too long?
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
4 reviews
17 of 17 people found the following review helpful
Classic Literary Novel
6 Nov 2008
Format:Paperback
"Chowringhee" by Mani Sankar Mukherji is destined to be viewed as a classic of world literature, just as it is already viewed as a classic of Indian literature. Written in Bengali, with a superb translation into English, this book tells the story of the group of individuals who work in and operate an exclusive hotel in Calcutta. The novel focuses on the characters, in a style reminiscent of Dickens, with emphasis on their individual personalities rather than on an external event.
The novel effectively creates a sense for the reader that the characters are all well-understood actual human beings, with the strengths and weaknesses that pertain to real human beings. We come to laugh and share the emotions of the characters. This novel deserves a much wider readership.
The novel would benefit from a glossary at the end for the quite few terms unique to India that are used. In addition, a reading guide would be useful as this would be a good selection for a book club.
The translator Arunava Sinha deserves special commendation for his efforts.
The novel effectively creates a sense for the reader that the characters are all well-understood actual human beings, with the strengths and weaknesses that pertain to real human beings. We come to laugh and share the emotions of the characters. This novel deserves a much wider readership.
The novel would benefit from a glossary at the end for the quite few terms unique to India that are used. In addition, a reading guide would be useful as this would be a good selection for a book club.
The translator Arunava Sinha deserves special commendation for his efforts.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
A newly translated classic of Indian literature
22 Nov 2009
Format:Paperback
The setting of this novel is Chowringhee, a neighborhood in Calcutta, in the mid-1950s. The narrator, Shankar, is an ambitious young man who finds himself out of a job with an English barrister, and is barely surviving by selling wastepaper baskets door to door. As he sits in a neighborhood park, pondering his past and fearful of what the future holds for him, a friend of his passes by, who is shocked by Shankar's descent into poverty. He tells Shankar that he can get him a job at the Shahjahan Hotel, one of the city's oldest and most venerable hotels, as the hotel manager is one of his clients.
Shankar is immediately befriended by Sata Bose, the hotel's chief receptionist, and after a brief stint as a typist, Shankar becomes Bose-da's main assistant and close confidant. The manager, Marco Polo, takes a liking to him as well, and young Shankar is given more responsibilities by both men. The novel revolves around the guests, entertainers, and frequent visitors of the Shahjahan, but several members of the hotel staff get equal billing in Shankar's narrative. We learn about the seamy underside of the elite of Calcutta, whose greed, shady deals, and shameful behaviors are initially shocking to our naïve young man, but he soons become jaded and disgusted by them. The poverty of working and jobless Calcuttans is vividly portrayed, as those not in the upper echelon are only one stroke of bad luck away from living in the streets or in dilapidated hovels. Love is a central theme, amongst the guests and workers, with often tragic results.
Chowringhee was a very entertaining and light-hearted though tragic read, which richly and effectively portrayed the struggles, joys and frustrations of the different strata of mid-20th century Calcutta.
Shankar is immediately befriended by Sata Bose, the hotel's chief receptionist, and after a brief stint as a typist, Shankar becomes Bose-da's main assistant and close confidant. The manager, Marco Polo, takes a liking to him as well, and young Shankar is given more responsibilities by both men. The novel revolves around the guests, entertainers, and frequent visitors of the Shahjahan, but several members of the hotel staff get equal billing in Shankar's narrative. We learn about the seamy underside of the elite of Calcutta, whose greed, shady deals, and shameful behaviors are initially shocking to our naïve young man, but he soons become jaded and disgusted by them. The poverty of working and jobless Calcuttans is vividly portrayed, as those not in the upper echelon are only one stroke of bad luck away from living in the streets or in dilapidated hovels. Love is a central theme, amongst the guests and workers, with often tragic results.
Chowringhee was a very entertaining and light-hearted though tragic read, which richly and effectively portrayed the struggles, joys and frustrations of the different strata of mid-20th century Calcutta.
Observing the world from a hotel in Calcutta
27 Jan 2012
Format:Paperback
This is the first-person story of young Shankar Mukherjee (a slight variant on the real name of the author, and there is at least one autobiographical element in the book). He must have had some special quality that made people be kind to him in a world in which otherwise kindness is in short supply. He is treated kindly by an English barrister for whom he works as a clerk. When the barrister dies, he loses his job, and scrapes a miserable living for a while as a salesman of baskets. A kind acquaintance then gets him a new job at the Shahjahan, the most luxurious hotel in the Chowringhee area of Calcutta. The hotel staff is run in such a way that inferiors are kept on their toes by those higher up in the hierarchy, who in turn are obsequious to their superiors for fear of losing their job. Yet Shankar's immediate superior, the chief receptionist Bose (quite a philosopher and, like Shankar, well read in Bengali and Euorpean literature), could not be kinder to his new and naive recruit, and even the choleric and manager, Marco Polo (there is quite a story how he came to have that name), who deliberately terrifies the entire staff, makes an exception of him and treats him with kindness.
What Shankar learns about the staff and of the guests in the hotel is the main theme of the book and provides a kaleidoscope of many individual stories and stories within stories, some entertaining, some very sad, some more interesting, some (in my opinion) very much less so: I found it quite hard to persevere to the end of the book, which circles back to conclude stories near the beginning of which I had quite lost track.
The ghost of its founder still haunts the hotel; and a lot of sleazy and shady things happen in it: expensive sex is available; rival businessmen plot to do each other down; there is an extended piece where wealthy and whisky-sodden guests slaver over a strip show; at one time Shankar makes a generalization which is borne out by only some of the stories: "It's a world where sentiments have no value ... where people were familiar with just two objects: the wallet and the cheque book." For he also tells of relationships of real warmth - most notably that between himself and Bose.
Scattered through the book there is quite a bit about the history of Calcutta from its foundation by Job Charnock in 1690 onwards. Some of the characters in the novel really existed, for example the father of the English parliamentarian Fenner (here mis-spelt Frenner) Brockway was indeed a missionary in Calcutta.
The novel is said to be a Bengali classic - but I quite fail to see how one reviewer can put Sankar up there with Salman Rushdie, Rohinton Mistry, Arundhati Roy and Vikram Seth.
What Shankar learns about the staff and of the guests in the hotel is the main theme of the book and provides a kaleidoscope of many individual stories and stories within stories, some entertaining, some very sad, some more interesting, some (in my opinion) very much less so: I found it quite hard to persevere to the end of the book, which circles back to conclude stories near the beginning of which I had quite lost track.
The ghost of its founder still haunts the hotel; and a lot of sleazy and shady things happen in it: expensive sex is available; rival businessmen plot to do each other down; there is an extended piece where wealthy and whisky-sodden guests slaver over a strip show; at one time Shankar makes a generalization which is borne out by only some of the stories: "It's a world where sentiments have no value ... where people were familiar with just two objects: the wallet and the cheque book." For he also tells of relationships of real warmth - most notably that between himself and Bose.
Scattered through the book there is quite a bit about the history of Calcutta from its foundation by Job Charnock in 1690 onwards. Some of the characters in the novel really existed, for example the father of the English parliamentarian Fenner (here mis-spelt Frenner) Brockway was indeed a missionary in Calcutta.
The novel is said to be a Bengali classic - but I quite fail to see how one reviewer can put Sankar up there with Salman Rushdie, Rohinton Mistry, Arundhati Roy and Vikram Seth.
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