Starred review from February 9, 2015
Chaudhuri’s (Afternoon Raag) latest novel, set in the world of Bengali expats living in Thatcher-era London, is a gently humorous book that riffs on Homer’s Iliad and Joyce’s Ulysses. Eschewing a traditional narrative arc, Chaudhuri primarily explores the friendship between Ananda, a 22-year-old Bengali expat and student of English literature, and his uncle, Radhesh, who is obsessed with the workings of his gastrointestinal and urinary tracts. As the duo wander the streets of England’s capital city, they discuss love and sex, race and empire, and notions of exile and exclusion. Descriptive details are richly evocative of 1980s London, a quotidian world of teabags, cheese and pickle sandwiches, and bland television shows—all marred by the ubiquity of racism, skinheads, neo-Nazis, and anti-immigrant sentiment. Both men are homesick, although Radhesh denies his longing to return to his native land. As Ananda ponders viraha, a poetic term referring to a separation from something beloved, Radhesh longs to be somewhere where he is not defined by the continent in which he was born. The frustrated yearning to belong—somewhere, anywhere—reverberates plaintively throughout.
Starred review from February 1, 2015
A meandering, sometimes mesmerizing quasi-novel about two Indian men living separately in London in 1985 and taking one of their regular walks together while memories arise and intrude. Chaudhuri (Calcutta: Two Years in the City, 2013, etc.) returns to familiar themes of Indian emigres, university life and music-most similar to those of the 1993 novel Afternoon Raag (published in the U.S. in the collection Freedom Song). Here, he deploys prose that has been described as Proustian in a plotless excursion with Joycean elements. It occupies one day yet has ramifications through several branches of a family tree across three generations. The title and some chapters refer to characters or elements from The Odyssey, while playful allusions to Ulysses dot the book. The first half of the narrative follows dyspeptic 22-year-old Ananda, a singer, so-so student at University College London and aspiring poet with a weakness for Philip Larkin. He ponders his noisy neighbors, tutors, sexual frustration and homesickness piqued by his formidable mother's recent visit. He takes comfort in weekly constitutionals with his uncle, the dominant figure of the book's second half. Radhesh is wealthy, though he retired one rung shy of his corporate goal, and is a lifetime short of losing his virginity. He lives in a modest flat and dispenses largess to relatives and a feckless neighbor. He played matchmaker as the brother of Ananda's mother and the best friend of her husband-to-be. Radhesh and Ananda enjoy a prickly affection that stems from the nephew's penury, their love of music, and the ties of heart and tongue to the homeland. Chaudhuri sprinkles Bengali words throughout the text-including Radhesh's sad refrain, translated as "There's a covering of moss on my heart." The words' strangeness may frustrate some readers, as may Chaudhuri's ambling sense of story arc, but they add another kind of music to a work that captivates almost in spite of itself. Like Joyce, Chaudhuri recognizes that the seemingly artless rhythms and repetitions of daily life can have, in thoughtful hands, the depth and breadth of true art.
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Starred review from April 1, 2015
Certain that his destiny was to become a world-famous poet, Ananda left Bombay to attend college in London. After two years, he still feels foreign and out of place. Lonely and infuriated by the drunken mayhem of his taunting neighbors, he finds English poetry feeble in comparison to the grandeur of India's epics and rarely attends classes. His only nearby relative is Radhesh, his kind, quaint uncle, who prides himself on being an English gentleman in spite of his terribly straitened circumstances and the racial prejudice he encounters. Master of nuance Chaudhuri (The Immortals, 2009) orchestrates a fraught yet tender relationship between these two sweetly deluded outsiders navigating the vicissitudes of 1985 London, telling their stories via a brilliantly incisive and delectably witty improvisation on Homer's Odyssey (which Ananda hasn't bothered to read ) and James Joyce's Ulysses (which Ananda found incomprehensible). As in the latter, Chaudhuri's novel takes place over the course of one day on which nephew and uncle roam the city together while Ananda's restless thoughts and surging memories illuminate everything from family predicaments to the legacy of British rule in India to the mysteries of writing. With exceptional finesse and obvious pleasure, Chaudhuri has created a knowing, wry, and affectionate novel of the sustaining power of dreams and familial love.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)
November 15, 2014
A poet manque who feels a little glamorously homesick and outcast, 22-year-old Ananda enjoys his weekly ventures around 1985 London with his uncle, Radhesh, who lives in ostentatious poverty and has never accomplished a thing. Ananda ponders his family, Radhesh indulges his crazy ways, and Chaudhuri produces another big work of fiction to rival award winners like Freedom Song and his most recent book, the nonfiction Calcutta.
Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
April 1, 2015
This latest from Chaudhuri (Freedom Song; The Immortals) offers minimal plot: a 22-year-old homesick Indian literature student and aspiring poet wakes in his shabby London studio, practices his singing, meets his university tutor, delivers his rent, and visits his uncle Radhesh, with whom he shares an afternoon tea, a sweet shop foray, and a restaurant dinner before ambling home. The novel's pages, of course, contain much more: a single July 1985 London day (think Margaret Thatcher, hum "Karma Chameleon") in the life of an artistic wannabe reveals multiple lives within that single day, expanding from the quotidian to universal explorations of identity, sexuality, colonialism, immigration, politics, and more. Beyond what (little) happens is an insistent metanarrative that with few words asks us to consider and elucidate beyond the page: from the classically inspired title to chapters marked "Telemachus and Nestor" (Odysseus's son and his son's attentive host), "Eumaeus" (Odysseus's loyal swineherd friend), and "Ithaca" (home sweet home). VERDICT This Odysseus requires patient readers who are partial to internal epics and enjoy discovering clever references to classic and modern texts, from the Mahabharata to James Joyce's Ulysses, from Homer to Stephen King. For other British Asian "stranger-in-a-strange-land" narratives with more...well, narrative, try Nadeem Aslam's Maps for Lost Lovers or Monica Ali's Brick Lane. [See Prepub Alert, 10/20/14.]--Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC
Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.