Odysseus Abroad: A novel

by Amit Chaudhuri

In Odysseus Abroad, Amit Chaudhuri charts a day in the life of two Indian men—a twenty-two-year-old student trying (and failing) at being a poet and his bachelor uncle, who has been living in genteel poverty for nearly three decades—as they explore London, the city they now call home.

A wistful and beguiling work of fiction, the novel follows nephew and uncle on one of their weekly forays about town, as they ruminate on their situations, the art of living, and each other. Marked by the same sensual richness that is a hallmark of all of Chaudhuri’s work, here is a charming yet candid look at the experiences of the outsider, the struggles of youth and loneliness, and the spiky, needful, sometimes comical, yet ultimately loving connection between two generations.

Genres: Fiction, India, Literary Fiction, Novels, Historical Fiction, Indian Literature, British Literature

229 pages, Paperback

First published September 29, 2014

About the author

Amit Chaudhuri was born in Calcutta in 1962, and grew up in Bombay. He read English at University College, London, where he took his BA with First Class Honours, and completed his doctorate on critical theory and the poetry of D.H. Lawrence at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was a Dervorguilla Scholar. He was Creative Arts Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford, from 1992-95, and Leverhulme Special Research Fellow at the Faculty of English, Cambridge University, until April 1999, where he taught the Commonwealth and International Literatures paper of the English Tripos. He was on the faculty of the School of the Arts, Columbia University, for the Fall semester, 2002. He was appointed Samuel Fischer Guest Professor of Literature at Free University, Berlin, for the winter term 2005.

He is now Professor in Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia. He was made Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2009.

Reviews

[Saleh MoonWalker · Rating 3 out of 5]

Onvan : Odysseus Abroad - Nevisande : Amit Chaudhuri - ISBN : 1101874511 - ISBN13 : 9781101874516 - Dar 224 Safhe - Saal e Chap : 2014

[Filiz · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can see why this book would not be for some people. I love narratives with lovely language and thoughtful rumination, even without a powerful plot. As a woman with a nephew just Ananda's age, I did find the nephew-uncle dynamic very interesting. Although the novel explicitly evokes Joyce's Ulysses And Homer's Odyssey, both of which I have read, I was more reminded of woolf's "mrs Dalloway" in terms of the book's style snd premise. (And length).

[Tanuj Solanki · Rating 4 out of 5]

Joyce set out to neuter the epic-ness of Homer's grand story, to show that the mundane lives of people may mimic that story. And he developed a new way to describe mundanity; his syntatical innovations changed literature for ever. Chaudhuri, one would assume, shares the first ambition, for he too labours to show how a day in the lives of two Indians living in London - uncle and nephew - may mimic Homer. There is an added complexity here, of course, for his conversation with Joyce is definitely greater than his conversation with Homer. Given that, Chaudhuri's style of writing, in which sentence syntax is always perfect, introduces a new dimension. He writes like a 19th century Joyce, with the same sensibility regarding content but a style still closer to Flaubert than to the modernists. One is confused what to make of this decision.

Another comment about the aping of epics. Chaudhuri has said in an interview that Homer's Odyssey and other grand books are themselves characters in his book, characters that fit the template of Homer's Odyssey in turn. This rather post-modern chicanery complicates the act of mimicing, giving someone like Chaudhuri a broad range to paint his story with, where only some semblance with the grand story is expected and deviations are celebrated. I don't know what to think of that - for isn't that freedom in contradiction with the original ambition?

[Nathanael Kusanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

I adored it from start to finish. I loved that it was plotless, I loved the musings on identity and literature, especially as it pertains to colonialism. The subtleties of seeking home away from home and not quite finding it, the mannerisms of locals that are initially imperceptible but speak to a tangible void between experiences. The genre of international student fiction needs more works like this. I would read an entire anthology of Ananda's thoughts as he traverses London. I really want to read some Tagore now.

Vassily Grossman's notion of the universe inside each individual being distinct is realised so clearly here. The setting is familiar, the experience through which it is processed is entirely unique, so different from my own yet heightened in its relatability.

[Roger Brunyate · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well-written meditation on culture

This short book gives all the pleasures of a well-written memoir. Yes, I know it is labeled a novel, and if I were to look up the biography of the Indian-born author, now a professor at the University of East Anglia, I would find many differences between his life and that of his protagonist Ananda Sen. But in writing of a budding poet who comes to London University to study English Literature in the Thatcher era, he is clearly drawing on his own experience: same date, same school, same subject. It is also hard to see the book as a novel because it has no plot. The first of the six parts concerns Ananda's apartment, neighbors, and immediate environment. The second is about his studies: a succession of tutors who try to drag him back from an almost exclusive focus on the moderns to read the literature of earlier eras. By this time, we are almost half-way through the book. The last four parts set up that stroll around North London in the company of his eccentric uncle Rangamama that presumably gives the work its title, in homage to Joyce's tour of Dublin in Ulysses. Ananda interacts with a number of other characters in the book but, with the exception of his uncle, they all pass on by. He does not fall in love, or get into fights; we never know if he succeeds or fails at his academic goals; nothing really happens beyond talk and description, but these really are good:

He stirred the milk in the mug, till, turning from clear but dark to pale brown and neutrally uniform, the water had become tea-like, the spoon negotiating the vortex it had set in motion by constantly evading, and sometimes colliding into, the submerged leviathan tea bag. Then he'd retrieved it from the pool on his spoon, at once swollen and unresistant, dead but still smoking, an incredibly ugly thing. Unable to look at it, he tossed it into the bin.

The book caught my attention as a pitch-perfect account of being an impoverished student (in my own first major, literature), and in a part of London where I did not study but later lived. I was out of England by the time Thatcher took office, but I fully trust his description of the times. Although Ananda's Indian birth is an essential part of who he is, this is no typical immigrant saga; I was drawn to him by what we had in common, not by how we differed.

But when Ananda gets together with his uncle, a well-off old bachelor living in a basement apartment even more squalid than his own, the focus changes. Rangamama comes from Bengal and is a disciple of Rabindranath Tagore (whom he refers to as "Ravi Thakar"), and much of their discussion concerns Bengali culture. Here, I feel that Chaudhuri is no longer writing for the general reader, but one who already knows quite a bit about India. Here is an example, the uncle's reaction to Indian classical music:

Ananda was humming a raga: Purvi. His uncle couldn't abide classical music. Not only because of its demonstrative virtuosity, which he regarded with contempt. (Anything outside his ken was beneath him. He bowed to no superior form or authority.) But also the sacred context of classical music embarrassed him. Being a Tagorean, he saw the universe in a bright humanist radiance. Any mention in songs of Hari, Radha, or Ram made him flinch. That's what the Brahmo antecedents of modern Bengal had done—turned the Bengali into a solitary voyager, with no religion and nothing but a raiment of poems, Tagore songs, and—instead of deities—novelists and poets.

This last sentence is a pretty good description of Ananda, his uncle, and perhaps the author himself. I note that Chaudhuri has published a book called Clearing a Space: Reflections on India, Literature and Culture. I have not read it, but suspect that his main intention here was to present some of these thoughts in the more approachable form of a "novel." But it may be time to remove those quotation marks; if a novel is defined by characters rather than plot, this certainly has two living and breathing major ones, and a number of minor figures who, for a while, go beyond two dimensions. But its principal interest is in its ideas. It is one of those books that kept sending me back to Google to find out more about some point of history or literature (including a satirical poem by Swift I didn't know, and opening my eyes to the work of Geoffrey Hill), or to You Tube to listen to the songs of Tagore. As a novel, I would not give it more than three stars, but for a man of intelligence sharing his thoughts as in a memoir, it certainly merits four.

[Rahul Singh · Rating 5 out of 5]

After completing some unwanted paperwork at the university, I was out on College Street contemplating to run a book-errand. It was then I chanced upon this book and I immediately grabbed at it on a winter day. A very typical Calcuttan experience, indeed! To begin with, I, wholeheartedly, loved this book. It was the very quintessential Amit Chaudhuri I had been expecting it to be and even better, I must say. As the title itself suggests, it is a retelling, or rather an allegory of the King Odysseus' life, journey and of his family. Much like The Jesus Trilogy of Coetzee, you don't find King Odysseus anywhere in the book. Rather we find Ananda, a young Indian boy who's in London finishing his undergraduate studies in English Literature in the 1980s. If he isn't singing or jerking off to pornographic magazines or his professor, he writes poetry in his studio apartment amidst a lot noise from the Patels and other Indians residing above. For an academically average student, he detests classes and is waiting impatiently to have his writing published in a literary magazine someday soon. On a bright summer day in London, he plans to meet his uncle who has been staying at Belsize Park on a retirement plan for years. The visit to his uncle, then, becomes one of the significant events of the story giving the reader a sense of what it is to search for belongingness, for oneness, for an identity that's not always in turmoil and a search, perhaps, to seek solace. The family's Sylheti ancestry and then migration to the west has been flagged off throughout the book as the author makes the reader travel back and forth. This journeying is done through the various incidents of their lives to get a sense of where the characters are coming from and their destination, much like Odysseus' journey to the war and back to Ithaca after years of being an alien. Chaudhuri, also, I feel, has a tendency to place this one bengali/Indian character who's lived for a long time in the west and sticks to the stereotypical representation of a Bengali- obsession with Tagore, the Bengali food, Bengali middle class attitude toward saving and consumption etc. Sometimes, it's funny and then you feel the sadness Chaudhuri imbues to this man. He becomes a representation of the Indian identity in turmoil, a foreigner asking for a place in a white-land, a man missing the idea of home and his Bengal/India through and through living in nostalgia. Ah, I found the book very refreshing and absolutely wonderful. Easily among one of the best books of the year already! Thankful to that book-errand-run at College Street on January.

[Sara · Rating 2 out of 5]

Symbiosis: "Permanent union between organisms each of which depends for its existence on the other as the fungus and alga composing lichen." - Concise Oxford Dictionary.
By the end of this book you're not sure which of these two expatriate characters, the uncle or the nephew, is the fungus and which the alga. In the beginning it seems that the nephew is more healthy but by the end...
They are both gifted poetic types whose gifts have turned inward. This might have happened anywhere but the process is hastened by their transplantation into an alien culture. They are well-born Bengalis living in down-at-heel parts of London and although they refer everything to their origins in India, they will probably never return there...or will they?
This is an interesting book but nothing much happens externally and that becomes wearing, hence my 2 stars.
Muriel Barbery writes about similar alienation in The Elegance of the Hedgehog - an intelligent well-read peasant-born concierge and a similarly gifted 12 year old girl trapped in a pretentious upper-class leftist French family. But things HAPPEN. I don't know if more happens in Chaudhuri's other books or not. Not sure I am motivated to find out...

[remarkably · Rating 3 out of 5]

well-constructed finely-observed formally-perfect functionally-insubstantial book. perfect for a medium length train journey, lacks the forcefulness that would cause me to revisit it again. there are some really good thoughts in it I think but they are so under-played as to fail to impinge upon the mind

[Stephen Durrant · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ananda is adrift in London, where he is a kind of non-heroic Odysseus--or maybe a Telemachus--making decidedly short journeys with his uncle in a world almost as strange, at least to him, as the world through which Homer's Odyssey takes us. His journeys only lead back to his bedsit, where he strives to write poetry and wonders whether one must have the experience of love to write of love. Meanwhile, his real home is very far off--eastern Bangladesh. His current world belongs to the odd English, whom he really doesn't understand, and the tenuous network of Indian immigrants who strew not altogether authentic fragments of his homeland throughout London. Chaudhuri's novel is both poignant and funny. The most enjoyable character is not Ananda but his uncle, Radesh, for whom there is only one benchmark poet--yes, Tagore--and who is replete with theories: for example, Jesus was obviously quite virile. A good read, to be sure. Not much happens, despite the title, precisely because these characters are hardly dealing with epic struggles. Then again, neither are we.

[Jordan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ananda, a 22-year old Bengali student of English Literature, is somewhat adrift in London. We follow him over the course of his day, through his feelings of alienation in the city and frustration with his university course. In doing so, we also meet his uncle, with his own (often comical) immigrant experience. Through these uncle-nephew wanderings, I enjoyed recognising plenty of references to Ulysses (such as a passage on the uncle's bowel movement!) and the Odyssey. Had this book been any longer, it may have grown tiring—it really is a book where nothing happens—but the prose was beautiful and the characters amusing and endearing.

[Leo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maybe it wasn't weird I picked up the Odyssey at the same time as this after all.
Anywho to this book, not for me or read it at the wrong time. But leaning more that it wasn't for me.

[Micah · Rating 3 out of 5]

The references to Ulysses struck me as inelegant, but there wasn't much I found propulsive otherwise.

[Emma Keiser · Rating 4 out of 5]

very interesting, basically Ulysses but set in England in the 80s and about two Indian immigrants. I liked it but I can see why some didn't. Ananda is so me (addicted to eating tums)

[Pamela Ferguson · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting account of nephew and uncle immigrants frim India to England. Speaks of the immigrant condition. Lots of poetry reference. Inyeresting.

[Sunjay · Rating 4 out of 5]

A humorous take on a 1980s immigrant story. Chaudhuri has a great memory of Thatcherite London, and his description of a city on the threshold of a gentrification revolution is evocative of a time wherein which we all could perhaps think about affording a small let flat in London. Ananda's uncle is a great portrait of the last full generation of middle class workers who were able to retire comfortably on a pension that was never in doubt of going away, and his frivolity with his cash is both endearing and face-cringing for our current millenial generation. To rent a maisonette in Central London, to have a steady stream of income that allows one to live the life he or she chooses, and to have an entire city at your doorstep to explore, does any Londoner want anything more than that?

[rüya · Rating 4 out of 5]

i often enjoy narratives that don’t contain much action but rather thoughtful rumination and long walks through the past, so i definitely got some enjoyment out of this!!! it does feel dreadfully ironic that i was assigned this as pre-reading for my english course at uni, almost like they were giving me a preview of what it’s going to be like? ominous! but it’s relieving to be able to approach most of ananda’s apprehensions with rationality :)

[Lilgeekette]

I stopped reading this book as i found the style very boring. it was difficult for me to continue reading as the first pages left me with a "what the fuck " feeling. I cant even tell you what is the book about or what i am reading.
I doubt i'll pick it up later, who knows, but for now i prefer to stop this massacre and to read more "stimulating" and interesting books.
Sorry but for me it was not a match.

[BookBrowse · Rating 4 out of 5]

"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." - Poornima Apte, BookBrowse.com. Full review at: https://www.bookbrowse.com/reviews/in...

[Lynn · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really enjoyed the language of this book, and could appreciate echoes of both Homer & Joyce in the writing & structure, but ultimately I could find little in the characters, either the nephew or his uncle, which actually interested me. Ananda's mother, by contrast, seemed much more enticing. A book to be read for what it is attempting to do, rather than for enjoyment.

[South Buncombe Library]

2 stars for being utterly forgettable but attractively packaged. -Sarah

[Tony Laplume · Rating 3 out of 5]

The dust jacket really wants readers to have James Joyce in mind. I confess, I haven’t actually read Joyce yet, so the success or indeed even the accuracy of such a comparison is somewhat lost on me. I can recognize that Odysseus Abroad seeks to accomplish a specific kind of literature. There may be readers dazzled by the results. Indeed, there may be those who hail it as a classic. I’m inclined to more tempered thoughts. I see that it deliberately presents a “stranger in a strange land” narrative, and that it deliberately revolves around a journey full of bewilderment, disappointment, and desire, but it’s still a difficult thing to appreciate. No conclusions are attempted, only suggestions, and again, that may be by design, and it may amaze some, but for this reader, there is no magic in the results. It’s short and yet not sweet. Not being overly familiar with the author, I personally am inclined to assign his mindset to that of Ananda, the main character, a young student and would-be poet who confesses a disconnect with European literature. The concept of the title and segment headings, I don’t know if that’s the most visible Joycean link, something to be read into by future scholars, or the book’s worst literary leap.

The only thing I am absolutely prepared to say about the results is that they are a decent reflection on the continued complicated relationship between India and England, a subject little reflected on in recent years but no less significant for it. That and the difficulties of living in someone else’s culture while clinging stubbornly to your own.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was quietly spectacular. Best for anyone who really loves sentences. I really wish I could write like this, as he mentions about Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, which is to say the ability to write about regular life's comings and goings, and yet not in Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay's social relist bent because it's mediated by a poetic sensibility that is just beginning to form. So here you have someone who writes so beautifully and with such confidence and it's easy to miss because he is committed to -- really loves, rather -- the beat if regular life. I love the sly sense of humor and also the poignancy of the uncle , as irritating as he can be. Also I've been reading about immigrant experiences and this one is a marvel because of the main character, Ananda, a student and poet of Bengal who loves the work of so many English writers such as Philip Larkin and Geoffrey Hill, even as he struggles with studying in the imperial metropolis which is full of English, who are "repulsive in groups" and "laugh aggressively". Also I found the discussions of Bengali literature and Tagore fascinating. In this book he also without any apparent effort is able to portray the frustration and impatience of the young student with the fusty turgid anxiety of his retired virgin uncle, Radesh. I would enjoy spending a lot more time with these two

Huge Baggy Monster: Mimetic Theories of the Indian Novel After Rushdie

I.E.D.S.

[Anirban Nanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Almost an epic journey through the streets of London. Perfect adjectives to evoke an exact feeling of a particular moment. I think I can read this book a hundred times to re-experience those moments: wondering how sounds can come through a thin slit, how noises made by the neighbors above can show the mentality of an entire generation. Tiny details. Of huge significance. The mundane can be as exciting as Ulysses' epic homecoming. I was marking each chapter with notations to match the original Odyssey but soon, it became redundant. I realized that the struggle of each day can be epic, Homerian, but never Mahabharatiya.

[Paul Taylor · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have read Homer's Odyssey twice since studying it at school. I have read Ulysses once and felt that my non-comprehension was to a degree because I don't know Dublin. Odysseus Abroad is set in a part of London which I only know tangentially but certainly better than I know Dublin. Therefore that the novel left me nonplussed cannot be attributed to geography. Whilst I have visited India I am not familiar with Sylheti culture, which may be one reason why I did not get the message of the book but at the root of it is, I expect, my inability to relate to inertia and the acceptance of failure. The book has left me disappointed.

[Daniel Polansky]

A day in the life of a would-be Bengali poet matriculating at a London university faintly mimics Joyce's work faintly mimicking Homer's. Biases on the table I tend tI find critiques of of the west from non-western writers entertaining but even still I thought this was quite strong. Apart from a fascinating depiction of Thatcher's London (and the Indian sub-community in particular) it truly does resemble Joyce in its earthy humanism and the essential sympathy it has for its characters.

[Mariah · Rating 3 out of 5]

A day in the life of an aspiring Indian poet and his uncle and their life in London. Their comical dialogue and interactions and ruminations on life, aspirations, and the immigrant experience make the book. There is no particular "plot" to speak of, just the unfolding of the day and the opportunities it provides to illuminate the experience of being "other" for the reader.

[Samarth Bhaskar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Set in a day, borrowing and expanding upon the Odyssey and Ulysseus, full of sharp writing and painterly metaphors about race, politics, literature, class and young ambition, I'm glad this essay brought this novel to my attention. I'm glad I made time for it. And I'm glad more books like this will some day exist in this world.

[Adela Moon · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF oh my god I hated this so so much it was awful. I couldn’t finish it which I hated. I picked this up based entirely on the cover, cause it is one of the neatest covers I’ve ever seen, and I hated every 90 pages or so that I read of it. I tried to power through and I simply could not. I definitely should’ve read the reviews lmao

[Claire · Rating 2 out of 5]

Actual rating: 2.5 stars

[TheSpillingQuill · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars