“Today, I still wonder why I write novels.” Amit Chaudhuri says in his essay, ‘Why I write novels’: “It isn’t to master an art that I have no desire to master, but, evidently, to create something out of my perplexity with the form.”
Since the publication of his first book, A Strange and Sublime Address in 1991, Chaudhuri’s fiction has shown us that “perplexity with the form” can create art at least as intriguingly as “mastery” over it. Perplexity can be an intense form of engagement — dislike can be too, as Chaudhuri has argued elsewhere. Love is not necessarily the most generative relation to something, and neither is mastery the greatest assurance of soulful art. For Chaudhuri, the perplexity, or the resistance to narrative realism is his “resistance to the air of recounting; the air that something is over — that what you have before you as you read a novel is an event, or life, as well as an artefact, that’s already finished.”
