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Book Reviewed by:A beguiling new novel, at once wistful and ribald, about a day in the life of two Indian men in London, each coping in his own way with alienation, solitariness, and the very art of living.
From the widely acclaimed writer, a beguiling new novel, at once wistful and ribald, about a day in the life of two Indian men in London - a university student and his bachelor uncle - each coping in his own way with alienation, solitariness, and the very art of living.
It is 1985. Twenty-two-year-old Ananda has been in London for two years, practicing at being a poet. He's homesick, thinks of himself as an inveterate outsider, and yet he can't help feeling that there's something romantic, even poetic, in his isolation. His uncle, Radhesh, a magnificent failure who lives in genteel impoverishment and celibacy, has been in London for nearly three decades. Odysseus Abroad follows them on one of their weekly, familiar forays about town. The narrative surface has the sensual richness that has graced all of Amit Chaudhuri's work. But the great charm and depth of the novel reside in Ananda's far-ranging ruminations (into the triangle between his mother, father, and Radhesh - his mother's brother, his father's best friend; his Sylheti/Bengali ancestry; the ambitions and pressures that rest on his shoulders); in Radhesh's often artfully wielded idiosyncrasies; and in the spiky, needful, sometimes comical, yet ultimately loving connection between the two men.
One: Bloody Suitors!
He got up at around nine o' clock with the usual feeling of dread. He threw off the duvet. Still unused to being vertical, he pounded the pillow and the sheet to ensure he'd dislodged strands of hair as well as the micro-organisms that subsisted on such surfaces but were invisible to the naked eye. He straightened the duvet, tugging at it till it was symmetrical on each side. He smoothed the sheet, patting it but skimming the starchy bit - a shiny patch of dried semen, already quite old - on the right flank of where he'd lain.
The anger inside him hadn't gone – from the aftermath of the concert. He'd watched it six days ago on TV: Africa, London, and Philadelphia conjoined by satellite. He switched it off after three quarters of an hour. By the time the Boomtown Rats came on, and the sea of dancing people in Wembley Stadium was being intercut with Ethiopian children with innocent eyes and bulbous heads, a phrase had arisen in his ...
With his quiet ruminative voice and powerfully crafted sentences, Chaudhuri has carved himself a specific kind of niche, where high art can be found even in one long Sunday afternoon walk, in such everyday “small existential dramas.”..continued
Full Review
(757 words)
(Reviewed by Poornima Apte).
Deborah Levy, author of Swimming Home
Witty, intimate, and modern, Chaudhuri’s insight into the loneliness and excitement of our search for elsewhere had me under its spell. An unforgettable walk through London and other worlds by one of our most entertaining and artful writers. Nadeem Aslam
A wonderful novel which has everything in it—pathos, humour, lyricism and style—by one of the most remarkable novelists writing today.Set in 1980s London, Odysseus Abroad features a young Bengali protagonist Ananda Sen, who is in the city to study poetry — "his sights were set on the Olympian, the Parnassian: especially getting published in Poetry Review." The elephant in the room is the greatest of all Bengali poets, Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941). Even if the venerable polymath once lived in London, he is no longer remembered, bemoan uncle and nephew in the novel: "...to be a Bengali in London meant being the owner of a Bangladeshi restaurant. What a joke, what a come-down!"
Rabindranath Tagore (pronounced in Bengali as Row-bean-dra-naath Tag-ore) was a scion of a venerable Calcutta family; father Debendranath was a key figure in the Brahmo Samaj, a ...
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