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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.
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
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(Reviewed by Poornima Apte).
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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