AUTHOR PAGE
JOYDEEP ROY-BHATTACHARYA
Author of philosophical
thrillers
OCTOBER 25, 2007
CALENDAR LISTING:
India-born novelist Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya, UAlbany Writer-in-Residence
and author of the philosophical thriller, “The Gabriel Club” (1998),
will discuss new work set in Germany between the World Wars, and in
various parts of the Muslim world, on Thursday, October 25, 2007 at
4:15 p.m. in the Assembly Hall, Campus Center on the UAlbany uptown
campus. The event is sponsored by the New York State Writers Institute
and UAlbany English Department, and is free and open to the public.
PROFILE
Born and educated in India, Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya
is the author of the first novel “The Gabriel Club”(1998),
a philosophical murder mystery about the fate of a group of artists and
political dissidents in Budapest, Hungary. The action unfolds during
the Communist regime in the 1970s, and many years later, after Communism’s
fall. The Budapest police are called in to investigate when a wax effigy
of the club’s founder is discovered floating in the Danube River,
nearly 20 years after her mysterious disappearance.
Roy-Bhattacharya will discuss two works-in-progress: “Homeland,”a
two-thousand page novel set in interwar Germany; and “The Desert
of Love,”the story of a couple’s sudden disappearance from
a market square in Marrakesh, Morocco. “The Desert of Love” is
the first in a planned trilogy of novels set in various parts of the
Muslim world, including modern Iraq, India, and the United States. The
author is a faculty member of the Bard College Workshop in Language and
Thinking, and presently serves as Writer-in-Residence in the UAlbany
English Department.
Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee called the “The Gabriel Club,” “An
impressive debut, serious and passionate.” The reviewer for the
London “Independent” called it “an impressive poetic
thriller,” and said, “The central characters act just as
you would expect from mittel-European intellectuals: they walk around
naked, smoke like chimneys and spend aeons of time debating the meaning
of existence.” The reviewer for “The Australian” remarked
on the novel’s mix of genres, “moving from hard-boiled thriller
to passages that read like homages to modernists such as Kafka and Joyce,” and
called it an “intense depiction of the psychic effects of living
under communism.” The book received the Grand Jury Prize at the
Budapest Book Fair, and has been published in 11 languages.
In an interview with India’s leading English-language daily, “The
Hindu,” the author responded to questions about why he chose to
set “The Gabriel Club” outside his native India. Pointing
out that Joseph Conrad never wrote about the country of his origin, he
stated, “As a writer, I would like to write about the things I
am passionate about. I feel very uncomfortable about including personal
details. Memory, freedom and faith that transcend national boundaries
are the central concerns of this book.”
For additional information, contact the Writers Institute at 518-442-5620
or online at http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst.
