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Summary
Summary
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.
Author Notes
Amit Chaudhuri, author of three previous novels, has won several awards for his writing. A contributor to the "London Review of Books," the "Times Literary Supplement," & "The New Yorker," he lives with his wife & daughter in Calcutta.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
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 migrs, university life and musicmost 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 textincluding 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. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* 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.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2015 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE TITLE OF Amit Chaudhuri's sixth novel may use the Greek form of the ancient hero's name, but the predecessor he's got in mind for this story of two Bengalis wandering around London isn't so much the "Odyssey" as it is "Ulysses." Still, both Homer and Joyce begin the same way: with a young and callow man setting out in search of an absent father. Call him Telemachus, call him Stephen Dedalus. Or call him Ananda Sen, who in 1985 is studying English literature in Britain's capital and making a bad thing of it. He wants to be a poet, he likes Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin, and he has begun to learn that Shakespeare's language isn't so much universal as rooted in English particulars. In a country with India's weather, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day" sounds like an "insult"; in England, it's a compliment. Some days Ananda manages to get himself to class, but he worries that his tutor, to whom he feels faintly superior, doesn't understand the "special quality" of his own poems, verses as derivative as those of Joyce's young man. He has made no friends and lives alone in a tiny apartment on the edge of Bloomsbury. Every so often he catches a glimpse of the young Englishwoman downstairs and finds himself smitten with lust. More often he's kept in a rage by the noise from the flat above, where two brothers, Gujaratis from another part of the Indian diaspora, seem to run a nonstop party. He feels superior to them as well, since they're only enrolled in business courses. Yet he knows little of London and lives mostly on Chinese takeout. Telemachus goes in search of his father, traveling through Greece and looking for what news he can find. Stephen Dedalus walks through Dublin to no great purpose, until he meets his symbolic parent, the wanderer Leopold Bloom, in one of the city's brothels. Ananda has nothing so colorful on tap, but he does have something more regular. His uncle, Radhesh, has spent much of his adult life in the city. Retired and living on a generous pension, he has as little with which to fill his days as Ananda himself. The young man isn't sure he actually likes his uncle. They get "on each other's nerves," and every time they meet, Ananda finds himself exasperated by Radhesh's all-too-reliable announcement that he has put a full "11 spoons of sugar" in his morning cup of coffee and drunk "10 glasses of water. ... Flushes the system. You should try it." Nevertheless the "frisson" has become necessary to each of them, and the uneventful days they spend together are the one regular feature of Ananda's life. The two will walk and eat and sometimes see a movie - James Bond if they're lucky, though on the day "Odysseus Abroad" is set all that's available is Buñuel. And they will talk above all of home: of their ancestral city in what is now Bangladesh, and of the parents Ananda so terribly misses. Chaudhuri takes almost half the novel to get Ananda to his relative's door, though by the time Radhesh actually appears we already know him well. This book may stick to a single day, but it so closely tracks the movement of Ananda's mind that it seems to offer us his entire emotional history, even going back, before he was born, to his parents' own days in London. His British tutors and his Indian music teacher, his wide reading and persistent indigestion, his fascination with Mrs. Thatcher and his deep ambivalence about Indian food in England - all that is here, along with a shrewd analysis of the character of his uncle, a man who has never married because "administering a family would leave less time to talk about himself." That inner life is not, however, presented in the jagged fragments of thought on which Joyce's stream of consciousness relied. Chaudhuri's prose is smoothly invisible, as underplayed as the action of the book as a whole. Most fiction deals with exceptional days, days on which something crucial happens. That's true even of "Ulysses," whose characters learn certain truths they haven't known before. But Ananda's day is just ordinary. Nothing changes, and the novel ends with the two men simply planning to meet again the next Monday. So the book's success depends on just how interesting Ananda's lightly ironized mind seems as one reads from moment to moment. He's young, but not a young jerk like Stephen Dedalus, and Chaudhuri never suggests that his suspended life is either typical or necessary. Ananda's loneliness and sense of isolation are rooted in his individual temperament and can't be written off as the consequence of his life abroad. He'd like to see it that way, of course, and the novel does suggest that he will someday have to sort himself out. Yet while that cleareyed equipoise seems admirable, it also means the stakes remain low, for both the novel and the character. Teju Cole's 2011 novel "Open City," about another young wanderer in a foreign city, offers a good contrast, carrying both the sense of estrangement and the historical freight that this book lacks. "Odysseus Abroad" is an attractive wisp, a time capsule for anyone who knew the still scruffy London of the mid-1980s. Chaudhuri's readers will admire his skill - and wish this book were not, in the end, as bland as the British food of yore. MICHAEL GORRA'S most recent book is "Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece" He teaches English at Smith College.
Library Journal Review
It's 1985, and Margaret Thatcher has a stranglehold on England's poor when listeners meet 22-year-old Ananda Sen. He's desperately homesick but clings to the hope that his dedication to his studies will make him an acclaimed poet. In an attempt to feel more like he's in India, he frequently meets his Uncle Radhesh. Radhesh has lived in London for 30 years but also feels like an outsider. Chaudhuri patterns this short stream-of-consciousness novel on James Joyce's Ulysses, which is Ananda's favorite book. As nephew and uncle amble around London, the vivid descriptions of streets, buildings, and the people they encounter take listeners with them. Their discussions about Indian food and their meal in an authentic Indian restaurant are equally engaging. Narrator Alex Wyndham does a commendable job distinguishing the two men, Ananda's attentive mother, and the few other characters. Verdict Those who enjoy James Joyce-like writing or in-depth discussions about poetry will most enjoy this work. ["This Odysseus requires patient readers who are partial to internal epics and enjoy discovering clever references to classic and modern texts": LJ 4/1/15 review of the Knopf hc.]-Susan G. Baird, formerly with Oak Lawn P.L., IL © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.