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Friend of My Youth
In Friend of My Youth, a novelist named Amit Chaudhuri visits his childhood home of Bombay. The city, reeling from the impact of the 2008 terrorist attacks, weighs heavily on his mind, as does the unexpected absence of his childhood friend Ramu, a drifting, opaque figure who is Amit's last remaining connection to the city he once called home.
Amit Chaudhuri's new novel is about geographical, historical and personal change. It asks a question we all grapple with in our lives: what does it mean to exist in both the past and the present? It is a striking reminder that, as the Guardian has said, 'Chaudhuri has been pushing away at form, trying to make something new of the novel.'
Amit Chaudhuri's new novel is about geographical, historical and personal change. It asks a question we all grapple with in our lives: what does it mean to exist in both the past and the present? It is a striking reminder that, as the Guardian has said, 'Chaudhuri has been pushing away at form, trying to make something new of the novel.'
176 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2017
31 people are currently reading
588 people want to read
About the author
Amit Chaudhuri
60 books174 followersAmit 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 70 reviews
April 17, 2019
The book is a novel. I'm pretty sure of that. What marks out a novel is this: the author and the narrator are not one. Even if, by coincidence, they share the same name. The narrator's views, thoughts, observations—essentially, the narrator's life—are his or her own. The narrator might be created by the author, but is a mystery to him. The provenance of his or her remarks and actions is never plain.
"By coincidence." Okay. It may be that the narrator of this book, Amit Chaudhuri, is not the author, even though he has the same name and background as the author, the same profession, and has even written a novel with the same title as the author's, on the same timeline. The idea that a narrator takes on a life of his own does make a certain sort of sense. Still, it's hard not to see Friend of My Youth as so-called autofiction, a thinly disguised version of the author's life. As such, not long after picking this up, I regretted reading it before any of Chaudhuri's other novels—I thought something so seemingly autobiographical would've been more interesting to me if I had some previous experience with the author's work.
Still, eventually I was pulled in. Friend of My Youth is a brief but poignant and thoughtful look at coming back to your childhood home after time away—and in the wake of a terrorist attack—and Chaudhuri's memories and vivid, almost tactile descriptions of Bombay (as the narrator still calls it) became more and more absorbing as the book went on. Midway through, Chaudhuri begins to talk about writing and his own views on the novel, and all of that was fascinating. I don't think it spoils anything to say that while Ramu, the titular "friend," looms large in the book, he never actually shows up in real time; he remains both an influential part of the past and a hopeful glimpse of the future. This is fitting; Chaudhuri talks here about how some beginnings are so good that they are best left as they are. As a depiction of friendship, Friend of My Youth is a kind of beginning, and ultimately the novel is a lovely fragment of time.
"By coincidence." Okay. It may be that the narrator of this book, Amit Chaudhuri, is not the author, even though he has the same name and background as the author, the same profession, and has even written a novel with the same title as the author's, on the same timeline. The idea that a narrator takes on a life of his own does make a certain sort of sense. Still, it's hard not to see Friend of My Youth as so-called autofiction, a thinly disguised version of the author's life. As such, not long after picking this up, I regretted reading it before any of Chaudhuri's other novels—I thought something so seemingly autobiographical would've been more interesting to me if I had some previous experience with the author's work.
Still, eventually I was pulled in. Friend of My Youth is a brief but poignant and thoughtful look at coming back to your childhood home after time away—and in the wake of a terrorist attack—and Chaudhuri's memories and vivid, almost tactile descriptions of Bombay (as the narrator still calls it) became more and more absorbing as the book went on. Midway through, Chaudhuri begins to talk about writing and his own views on the novel, and all of that was fascinating. I don't think it spoils anything to say that while Ramu, the titular "friend," looms large in the book, he never actually shows up in real time; he remains both an influential part of the past and a hopeful glimpse of the future. This is fitting; Chaudhuri talks here about how some beginnings are so good that they are best left as they are. As a depiction of friendship, Friend of My Youth is a kind of beginning, and ultimately the novel is a lovely fragment of time.
October 31, 2017
This is a reflective journey into childhood tinged with the sadness that things change whether you like it or not. When you no longer live in the place of your childhood there is a strange feeling that overcomes you to spot the similarities and differences when you return. Chaudhuri has captured this dislocation beautifully. I like his description of looking up into the sky to see where we might go and down to the ground to see where we have been.
April 5, 2022
It's not a happy ending; it's a convention created for the purposes of an impossible sense of uplift at the end of death and tragedy: the happy beginning. Technology makes Hades unnecessary.
2.5 stars. Elegiac and svelte but emotionally cold, this spare novel looks at the Jihadi attack on the Taj Hotel in 2008 and by extension upon a variation of the life of an author. A junkie best friend becomes a sounding board. This reader was left largely indifferent.
2.5 stars. Elegiac and svelte but emotionally cold, this spare novel looks at the Jihadi attack on the Taj Hotel in 2008 and by extension upon a variation of the life of an author. A junkie best friend becomes a sounding board. This reader was left largely indifferent.
September 13, 2020
A man by the name of Amit Chaudhuri who is not the author but also kind of is, strolls around the city of Bombay. He’s there to promote his new novel. It’s where he grew up, it’s the city that feels most like home, but it’s the city he didn’t want to live in and left when he could – though that doesn’t stop him from returning again and again. I loved this quiet, intelligent, introspective novel that felt less like a story and more like a series of meditations on a place and culture; on memory, the passage of time, and friendship. It’s very meta, and it flips the novel form on its head. I love to think about fiction as an art form, and I ate up Friend of My Youth’s interesting comments on the novel. I loved the casual tone, the calmness of the narrator’s voice, the subtle humour, and light melancholy. And yes, this novel is named after the story collection by Alice Munro. The narrator touches on it briefly. Of course that was a lovely cherry to put on the top of my experience. I’ll definitely read Chaudhuri again.
March 12, 2019
The writing is by no means underwhelming! The book is in fact mesmerizing (in its own niche way), and well written.
The novel, if at all a fiction in its entirety, is full of nostalgia and works as a fine travelogue for Mumbai/Bombay. A desirable throwback, one could say.
But so far as the story is concerned, i was personally expecting something TOTALLY different! Just not for me.
The novel, if at all a fiction in its entirety, is full of nostalgia and works as a fine travelogue for Mumbai/Bombay. A desirable throwback, one could say.
But so far as the story is concerned, i was personally expecting something TOTALLY different! Just not for me.
July 7, 2017
Originally posted on my blog.
A Meditation on Many Things: Amit Chaudhuri's Friend of My Youth
In Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines, the narrator confuses the sense in which we use the terms ‘coming’ and ‘going’. Amit Chaudhuri’s Friend of My Youth, like Ghosh’s novel, also plays with these terms while questioning, contradicting, and shifting our understanding of another term: ‘home’. Friend of My Youth is a meditation on many things: the city of Bombay, life, death, language, friendship, and the novel.
The novel’s narrator-protagonist is a writer named Amit Chaudhuri, who returns (comes or goes?) to Bombay, the ‘home’ of his childhood, for a literary event, two years after the 2008 terrorist attacks shook the city. As he moves across the city, which he never really knew and which perhaps did not know him either, he remembers his childhood friend, the 'idiot' (used here with affection) Ramu. Ramu is, in fact, absent from the narrator's first revisit to Bombay and appears, in-person, only in two revisits described towards the end of the novel.
The city of Bombay
The narrator, in the novel, confesses that he never really loved the city of his childhood. Yet, as he returns to it after many years, he finds himself in search of those very landmarks that made his childhood, landmarks that would help him orient himself. He visits the places most familiar to him, places that contributed towards making him the man he is. He refers to the city as Bombay and not as Mumbai (its new name since 1995) which is symptomatic of this attempt at a brush with the past. However, it is not a nostalgic reunion with the friend of his youth, the city of Bombay (and Ramu who is, in many ways, Bombay incarnate), that the narrator is aiming at.
The novel is critical of things that make the Bombay of present-day. Bombay is described as the least changeless of cities, yet, the narrator tells us, there are a few things that are the same as ever. The narrator is acutely aware of the events of the 2008 terrorist attacks. During his revisit, he stays at the Taj Mahal Hotel, an important landmark of his childhood but also one of the cites of the four-day attacks. He remembers watching the CCTV footage of the attacks that was broadcasted on television news and says,
"It's in the bad lighting of the CCTV video that the hotel echoes the mausoleum it's named after—in which tourists arc round the tombs encased in marble, shrouded in the perpetual semi-dark of mourning, where they can't take pictures."
Bombay, the narrator tells us, was never good enough for him. Even now, he hesitates to write about it. He talks of the impossibility of recovering whatever it was that formed him and what he 'churlishly' disowned. This reminds one of another attempt at recovering the 'lost' Bombay. In "Imaginary Homelands," Salman Rushdie describes the experience of travelling to Bombay and encountering his childhood 'home', which appears drastically different from the monochromatic version in his mind inspired by a black-and-white picture. Rushdie feels an alienation from his 'home' in Bombay, a 'home' which, according to him, can only be 'reclaimed' in memory. While Rushdie makes a case for the possibility of recovery, Chaudhuri complicates it.
Language, writing, and the novel
Perhaps the only way to recover the past of a city (somewhat imperfectly as memory itself is imperfect) and engage with its present is through language. Friend of My Youth makes some interesting observations on language and language-use. The narrator says that he hates the word 'refurbished' because it sounds like someone with a cold is trying to say 'furnished'. He talks about the phrase 'open sandwich' as being 'boldly counterintuitive'. He considers 'terrorist' (like 'anti-national') as a word that has lost meaning through repetition, such that it can refer to anyone now.
In relation to the city and its use of the English language, the narrator says,
"In Bombay, you subtly shift your speech so you sound like the one speaking to you. You don't want to stand out."
He informs us that people believe in multitasking in Bombay and that 'multitasking' is a word used frequently in the city. Moreover, he observes that Bombay is a city where everyone performs a function, reluctantly; he announces that "Reluctance is fundamental," which is perhaps a play on the title of Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist (a book that I coincidentally bought with Chaudhuri's book, so imagine my surprise and delight at finding this reference).
Regarding the word 'novel', the narrator says that the it has been used so variably over the years that no one is sure what it means anymore. The word does have unprecedented currency; the novel, writes Chaudhuri, is "no longer understood as a form, but as writing itself." Towards the end of the book, the narrator provides us with a more detailed description of the novel form. He says,
"What marks out a novel is this: the author and the narrator are not one. Even if, by coincidence, they share the same name [as in Friend of My Youth]... The narrator might be created by the author, but is a mystery to him."
Furthermore, the narrator refers to the 'business' of writing; the word 'business' having such a malleability in language. Writing is a business, especially in the present-day, and writers, as Chaudhuri writes, are "the pound of flesh that must be repaid in full." It must be noted that Chaudhuri is known for his experiments with the traditional novel form and realist narratives; he is praised for "pushing away at form, trying to make something new of the novel..." (from The Guardian).
A meditation on many things
Friend of My Youth is a good example of Chaudhuri's attempt at reworking the genre of the novel. It may be considered part fiction, part memoir (despite his warning against collating the narrator and the author), and part travelogue. What appealed to me, personally, about this short and well-written piece of work was its ability to meditate on many things, simultaneously: the city of Bombay and language (as discussed in detail above) but also life, death, and friendship.
Ramu, the narrator's eccentric friend who is seen slipping in and out of drug addiction, darkness, and the narrator's life, is an incarnation of Bombay itself. The narrator says that "Ramu is where Bombay lives" (an interesting linguistic inversion) and though Ramu may not be happy, he is always alive (energetic). Ramu is the only friend from school that the narrator has managed to remain in touch with. Regarding one's friends from school, the narrator says,
"School friends are like relatives; you can't deny [that] they were part of your growing up, but they come to mean nothing to you."
About death, Chaudhuri writes that around the age of sixteen or seventeen, you begin to realize that your parents are human and that they will eventually die. It grows increasingly clear that you are alone and always have been. Finally, reflecting on life, he says that it is not everyone's cup of tea. Since there is little choice in the matter, one assumes that life must be an excellent thing and that it is one's own fault if it isn't. There is no option but to remain invested in life and irrespective of age, we simply pretend that we have decided to be exactly where we are.
To conclude, told in first-person narration, moving between the past and the present, taking the reader on a short but important tour of Bombay that was and Mumbai that is, and meditating simultaneously on many things, Friend of My Youth is a gem-of-a-novel.
________________
Friend of My Youth by Amit Chaudhuri, published by Hamish Hamilton/ Penguin Random House India, 2017.
A Meditation on Many Things: Amit Chaudhuri's Friend of My Youth
In Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines, the narrator confuses the sense in which we use the terms ‘coming’ and ‘going’. Amit Chaudhuri’s Friend of My Youth, like Ghosh’s novel, also plays with these terms while questioning, contradicting, and shifting our understanding of another term: ‘home’. Friend of My Youth is a meditation on many things: the city of Bombay, life, death, language, friendship, and the novel.
The novel’s narrator-protagonist is a writer named Amit Chaudhuri, who returns (comes or goes?) to Bombay, the ‘home’ of his childhood, for a literary event, two years after the 2008 terrorist attacks shook the city. As he moves across the city, which he never really knew and which perhaps did not know him either, he remembers his childhood friend, the 'idiot' (used here with affection) Ramu. Ramu is, in fact, absent from the narrator's first revisit to Bombay and appears, in-person, only in two revisits described towards the end of the novel.
The city of Bombay
The narrator, in the novel, confesses that he never really loved the city of his childhood. Yet, as he returns to it after many years, he finds himself in search of those very landmarks that made his childhood, landmarks that would help him orient himself. He visits the places most familiar to him, places that contributed towards making him the man he is. He refers to the city as Bombay and not as Mumbai (its new name since 1995) which is symptomatic of this attempt at a brush with the past. However, it is not a nostalgic reunion with the friend of his youth, the city of Bombay (and Ramu who is, in many ways, Bombay incarnate), that the narrator is aiming at.
The novel is critical of things that make the Bombay of present-day. Bombay is described as the least changeless of cities, yet, the narrator tells us, there are a few things that are the same as ever. The narrator is acutely aware of the events of the 2008 terrorist attacks. During his revisit, he stays at the Taj Mahal Hotel, an important landmark of his childhood but also one of the cites of the four-day attacks. He remembers watching the CCTV footage of the attacks that was broadcasted on television news and says,
"It's in the bad lighting of the CCTV video that the hotel echoes the mausoleum it's named after—in which tourists arc round the tombs encased in marble, shrouded in the perpetual semi-dark of mourning, where they can't take pictures."
Bombay, the narrator tells us, was never good enough for him. Even now, he hesitates to write about it. He talks of the impossibility of recovering whatever it was that formed him and what he 'churlishly' disowned. This reminds one of another attempt at recovering the 'lost' Bombay. In "Imaginary Homelands," Salman Rushdie describes the experience of travelling to Bombay and encountering his childhood 'home', which appears drastically different from the monochromatic version in his mind inspired by a black-and-white picture. Rushdie feels an alienation from his 'home' in Bombay, a 'home' which, according to him, can only be 'reclaimed' in memory. While Rushdie makes a case for the possibility of recovery, Chaudhuri complicates it.
Language, writing, and the novel
Perhaps the only way to recover the past of a city (somewhat imperfectly as memory itself is imperfect) and engage with its present is through language. Friend of My Youth makes some interesting observations on language and language-use. The narrator says that he hates the word 'refurbished' because it sounds like someone with a cold is trying to say 'furnished'. He talks about the phrase 'open sandwich' as being 'boldly counterintuitive'. He considers 'terrorist' (like 'anti-national') as a word that has lost meaning through repetition, such that it can refer to anyone now.
In relation to the city and its use of the English language, the narrator says,
"In Bombay, you subtly shift your speech so you sound like the one speaking to you. You don't want to stand out."
He informs us that people believe in multitasking in Bombay and that 'multitasking' is a word used frequently in the city. Moreover, he observes that Bombay is a city where everyone performs a function, reluctantly; he announces that "Reluctance is fundamental," which is perhaps a play on the title of Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist (a book that I coincidentally bought with Chaudhuri's book, so imagine my surprise and delight at finding this reference).
Regarding the word 'novel', the narrator says that the it has been used so variably over the years that no one is sure what it means anymore. The word does have unprecedented currency; the novel, writes Chaudhuri, is "no longer understood as a form, but as writing itself." Towards the end of the book, the narrator provides us with a more detailed description of the novel form. He says,
"What marks out a novel is this: the author and the narrator are not one. Even if, by coincidence, they share the same name [as in Friend of My Youth]... The narrator might be created by the author, but is a mystery to him."
Furthermore, the narrator refers to the 'business' of writing; the word 'business' having such a malleability in language. Writing is a business, especially in the present-day, and writers, as Chaudhuri writes, are "the pound of flesh that must be repaid in full." It must be noted that Chaudhuri is known for his experiments with the traditional novel form and realist narratives; he is praised for "pushing away at form, trying to make something new of the novel..." (from The Guardian).
A meditation on many things
Friend of My Youth is a good example of Chaudhuri's attempt at reworking the genre of the novel. It may be considered part fiction, part memoir (despite his warning against collating the narrator and the author), and part travelogue. What appealed to me, personally, about this short and well-written piece of work was its ability to meditate on many things, simultaneously: the city of Bombay and language (as discussed in detail above) but also life, death, and friendship.
Ramu, the narrator's eccentric friend who is seen slipping in and out of drug addiction, darkness, and the narrator's life, is an incarnation of Bombay itself. The narrator says that "Ramu is where Bombay lives" (an interesting linguistic inversion) and though Ramu may not be happy, he is always alive (energetic). Ramu is the only friend from school that the narrator has managed to remain in touch with. Regarding one's friends from school, the narrator says,
"School friends are like relatives; you can't deny [that] they were part of your growing up, but they come to mean nothing to you."
About death, Chaudhuri writes that around the age of sixteen or seventeen, you begin to realize that your parents are human and that they will eventually die. It grows increasingly clear that you are alone and always have been. Finally, reflecting on life, he says that it is not everyone's cup of tea. Since there is little choice in the matter, one assumes that life must be an excellent thing and that it is one's own fault if it isn't. There is no option but to remain invested in life and irrespective of age, we simply pretend that we have decided to be exactly where we are.
To conclude, told in first-person narration, moving between the past and the present, taking the reader on a short but important tour of Bombay that was and Mumbai that is, and meditating simultaneously on many things, Friend of My Youth is a gem-of-a-novel.
________________
Friend of My Youth by Amit Chaudhuri, published by Hamish Hamilton/ Penguin Random House India, 2017.
August 11, 2025
I remember reading Alice Munro’s story with the same title as this last year and releasing a sigh at its melancholic tone. It is the same sigh I breathed when I read this very discerning book. We follow a writer in his home city Bombay. He is here as a middle-aged man to attend a book-talk and speak of his previous writings. It is the Bombay post 26/11. The writer had spent his childhood in South Bombay in the 1980s. At school, he had friends but it was one named Ramu that went on to be his closest. Ramu never made it big in life. He got into drugs and his life has since then been in-and-out of rehabs. The writer searches the friend in this city on his current visit. The friend of his youth. The friend whose youth never left him. The friend who always joked at anything too serious. Ramu is in rehab. And the author has to make-do with other friends and acquaintances when he isn't exploring the city. He misses Bombay's Parsi food, the pomfret, the daal and the view of the sea from Taj. He does everything while finding the friend of his youth blooming and decaying in each of these spaces. Amit Chaudhuri does a stunning job of evoking the city through his magnetic writing. He pays homage to the city, to Munro, and to his friend while celebrating the childhood he has spent there. The snippets from his childhood, the scenes where his mother makes her presence felt is beautifully rendered. I found myself lulled by the somnolent beauty. I enjoy reading books set in Bombay; be it Pinto, Mistry or Chaudhuri, they evoke the city and the throes of being in it peppered by nostalgia and a cognisance of disturbance. To me, that interests both as a reader of fiction and one who studies cities for work. This book, to me, is one of his best to date. I cannot forget some of the scenes from this book. I will always remember the heartening peace with which he represented a place like Taj where a youth has been lost, and time regained. Proustian, truly.
March 17, 2024
I am not equating Madurai with Mumbai and neither am I an accomplished writer. But I visit Madurai every 2-3 years - It is my mom's hometown and I did my college there - rent a room and stay for about 2-3 days and try to relive my memories there. The city limit can be traversed by walking if you are used to walking long distances and ofc, you can hop onto an auto or bus to go from point A to point B if the stretch does not hold any nostalgic value or if time is an issue. Point is I just wander around familiar places, they rekindle old memories and sometimes, memories are muddled up and I try to resolve them in my mind. The city also changes: a shopping centre would occupy a place that was once a favourite theatre, a busy restaurant that we used to haunt may not be doing the same kind of business. Other places get spruced up. Think you get the drift. If I write such experiences as a novel in excellent prose without bothering to have any kind of plot in a memoir kind of way...you would get this.
So you would like this if you, like me, like to read about Bombay and also like the kind of book I have described. 'Friend of my youth' just denotes a guy named Ramu who keeps the author company during his trips to Mumbai.
Rating: 4 stars - mainly for the writing
So you would like this if you, like me, like to read about Bombay and also like the kind of book I have described. 'Friend of my youth' just denotes a guy named Ramu who keeps the author company during his trips to Mumbai.
Rating: 4 stars - mainly for the writing
May 7, 2019
Chaudhuri is a master of transforming nostalgia into narrative, which, in this short novel, revolves around a friend of his youth, Ramu. His recollections of meetings with Ramu, who we learn in the beginning is quarantined in an Alibaug rehab, are interspersed with childhood memories and experiences growing up in the enclaves of South Bombay and, for a brief period, Bandra. Much of the book is narrated as vignettes that leap back and forth in spacetime, where we find the narrator (who we're told is different from the writer despite having the same name) on different visits to the city, lost in self-reflection, drinking in various buildings and sights, or navigating various professional and personal commitments. The presence of Ramu on these trips is remarked upon matter-of-factly, perfunctorily almost, and it's his absence that seems to make a deeper impact on the narrator's relationship with Bombay.
Stray notes:
- Some of the themes related to drugs, sobriety, and everything in between on the streets of Bombay are reminiscent of Thayil*, although I daresay the latter is more lyrical.
- Admittedly, I can't be too objective about this book since I was reading it through a haze of nostalgia myself; right down to the Sudhir Patwardhan cover art!
*Both Chaudhuri and Thayil, besides being very talented wordsmiths, also have a musical bone or two in them:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKfAp...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYn2-...
Stray notes:
- Some of the themes related to drugs, sobriety, and everything in between on the streets of Bombay are reminiscent of Thayil*, although I daresay the latter is more lyrical.
- Admittedly, I can't be too objective about this book since I was reading it through a haze of nostalgia myself; right down to the Sudhir Patwardhan cover art!
*Both Chaudhuri and Thayil, besides being very talented wordsmiths, also have a musical bone or two in them:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKfAp...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYn2-...
December 31, 2019
A writer settled in US, comes back to his hometown in Mumbai for a book reading session.
He recounts his memories of the city and people associated with the places.
His childhood friend named 'Ramu' accompanies him and gives him company in all his tours.
This book is a light memoir of the author's day to day experience. Like roaming around Gateway, Malabar Hill, Flora Fountain, Marine Drive, Bandra, Elphinstone, Nariman point, Colaba, Mahim, Hanging Gardens, Radio Club, Kamla Nehru Park etc etc. And also Joy Shoes :)
His food preferences - Paradise Café, Jimmy Boy's, Britannia, Pizza by the bay, Parsi Dishes… the places that have changed\perished since his childhood visits.
Excerpts from his interviews:
'How much of the novel is autobiographical?'
'I don't like the word autobiography'
'Why, sir?'
'Because I'm literally not interested in telling you about my life. The term indicates that I am.'
Recommeneded:
If you love reading prose over plot
If you like reading about Mumbai
If you are/want to be a writer
He recounts his memories of the city and people associated with the places.
His childhood friend named 'Ramu' accompanies him and gives him company in all his tours.
This book is a light memoir of the author's day to day experience. Like roaming around Gateway, Malabar Hill, Flora Fountain, Marine Drive, Bandra, Elphinstone, Nariman point, Colaba, Mahim, Hanging Gardens, Radio Club, Kamla Nehru Park etc etc. And also Joy Shoes :)
His food preferences - Paradise Café, Jimmy Boy's, Britannia, Pizza by the bay, Parsi Dishes… the places that have changed\perished since his childhood visits.
Excerpts from his interviews:
'How much of the novel is autobiographical?'
'I don't like the word autobiography'
'Why, sir?'
'Because I'm literally not interested in telling you about my life. The term indicates that I am.'
Recommeneded:
If you love reading prose over plot
If you like reading about Mumbai
If you are/want to be a writer
October 29, 2021
Nicely written, and perhaps would have more of an impact if I had any knowledge of Mumbai. But really, this is very slight, tediously meta (DID YOU KNOW YOU WERE READING A BOOK???), and not particularly insightful. I hope Chaudhuri enjoyed writing it, though. It seems like something that the author enjoys more than the audience.
April 1, 2019
A quietly thoughtful book about a writer's relationship with the city he grew up in, framed around his on and off connection to a childhood friend whose life has been troubled and stalled. Memory, the fitful passage of time, and shifting perspectives on one's own past are explored. And as a story which closely echoes the author's own life and work, there is also the question of how life informs fiction, or thinly veiled autobiography—that is, where author ends and protagonist begins.
The placement of this novel in south Bombay is specific, and yet drawing strongly on landmarks residents and tourists alike will know, so that even if one has had a brief encounter with the city it will resonate with extra depth. I was in Bombay for three days about a month before reading this, to attend a festival the author/narrator also attends at one point and meet up with a friend who is also mentioned in passing. I had actually taken the book with the intention of reading it in advance of my visit, but it was much more fun and meaningful to read it with a clear and recent, even if short-lived, acquaintance with the city behind me.
Full review at: https://roughghosts.com/2019/03/31/th...
The placement of this novel in south Bombay is specific, and yet drawing strongly on landmarks residents and tourists alike will know, so that even if one has had a brief encounter with the city it will resonate with extra depth. I was in Bombay for three days about a month before reading this, to attend a festival the author/narrator also attends at one point and meet up with a friend who is also mentioned in passing. I had actually taken the book with the intention of reading it in advance of my visit, but it was much more fun and meaningful to read it with a clear and recent, even if short-lived, acquaintance with the city behind me.
Full review at: https://roughghosts.com/2019/03/31/th...
October 3, 2017
This is an understated account of the way place and person become intertwined so that one can hardly enjoy the one without the other. The narrator / author, for it seems they are perhaps the same, returns to Bombay, where he had lived an extended period before. He has come for a reading from his latest novel, which gives him at moments a feeling of significance and at other moments a sense of ridiculousness. His memories of Bombay are closely connected with a friend named Ramu, who has long been a drug addict and is now isolated in a treatment center, where he is allowed no visitors. Bombay is no longer the same . . . and yet it persists. This theme is reinforced by the narrator’s decision to stay in the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel. Echoes of the terrible events of 2008 are all around, and yet the Taj retains, however artificially, its old world charm. Everything remains the same . . . and yet nothing remains the same. This is a small novel, well-written, and possessing a type of earnestness that makes it worth an hour or two.
August 29, 2019
I picked up this book during my brief visit back to Hyderabad, having flown in after a year. I happened to read just one paragraph before purchasing the book, never having previously heard of Amit Chaudhuri. It was enough to convince me that the writer knew exactly how it is to return to a place you wanted to leave so desperately and yet feel an odd longing to return to. His poetic prose was a joy to read. Though Bombay is a city that is alien to me, I enjoyed the personal descriptions of each place that he described. It did irk me to read constant references to Ramu, a character that had nothing to offer to me as a reader, and many a times the paragraphs seemed tedious to read through. I must however, appreciate how the writer has encapsulated nostalgia and the matters of the heart that tries to make peace between the past, present and future. All in all, a good one-time musing to read.
January 19, 2021
DNF at p. 123
April 9, 2024
i kinda had to force myself to finish this, it’s an interesting premise but i just found the narrator to be extremely insufferable i can’t stand that man.
generally this book just feels very half-assed. i only understood his project/purpose because he explicitly tells it to you in the book. and i think if you have to do that in a novel then maybe your book is not doing what its supposed to.
maybe i’m just dumb. idk.
generally this book just feels very half-assed. i only understood his project/purpose because he explicitly tells it to you in the book. and i think if you have to do that in a novel then maybe your book is not doing what its supposed to.
maybe i’m just dumb. idk.
March 18, 2020
Really enjoyed this. Short and sweet work of autofiction. Made me think a lot about my hometown of Cali, and how weird it feels to return to a place where you never really belonged.
"No one is sure any more what the novel is. The word has unprecedented currency. People are thrown it intermittently, and sometimes they throw it back. For about a decade now, when I've hedged and said, in answer to some query about my profession, 'I write novels,' people have occasionally countered with, 'Fiction or non-fiction?' Someone said to me that the 'novel' is now confused with the 'book' - it's no longer understood as a form, but as writing itself." (56)
"It's that dead time, when you're waiting for something that's neither entirely productive nor significant, but is supposed to be necessary." (74)
"I'm undecided about the time we live in. The ongoing passage to oblivion. The disappearance of things you took for granted. Then there's the renaissance of things you never knew of, or presumed you'd never see again." (122)
"The writing is not about life. It is a form of living. The two happen simultaneously." (143)
"Sometimes to look upon the old is not to discover the past: it is to see power." (147)
"No one is sure any more what the novel is. The word has unprecedented currency. People are thrown it intermittently, and sometimes they throw it back. For about a decade now, when I've hedged and said, in answer to some query about my profession, 'I write novels,' people have occasionally countered with, 'Fiction or non-fiction?' Someone said to me that the 'novel' is now confused with the 'book' - it's no longer understood as a form, but as writing itself." (56)
"It's that dead time, when you're waiting for something that's neither entirely productive nor significant, but is supposed to be necessary." (74)
"I'm undecided about the time we live in. The ongoing passage to oblivion. The disappearance of things you took for granted. Then there's the renaissance of things you never knew of, or presumed you'd never see again." (122)
"The writing is not about life. It is a form of living. The two happen simultaneously." (143)
"Sometimes to look upon the old is not to discover the past: it is to see power." (147)
July 19, 2019
Chaudhuri's experiments with novel writing craft reaps great success here. If you live (or have lived) in Bombay, pick this up without a thought.
October 16, 2023
Ratings:
Writing 4
Story line 4
Characters 4
Impact 3
Overall rating 3.75
Writing 4
Story line 4
Characters 4
Impact 3
Overall rating 3.75
August 31, 2021
This is a clever auto-fiction set in Bombay, a place of frequent returns and rediscoveries. It is also the story of childhood friendship, one taken for granted and missed only when it is no longer there. It is perhaps in the shared experience of many a migrant and overwhelmed me with nostalgia.
June 5, 2020
"The genre of "autobiography," the author-protagonist of Chaudhuri's novel Friend of My Youth explains to a journalist during an interview,"presumes you first live your life and then pour it into a piece of writing" Chaudhuri attempts to avoid this by creating a narrative that is experienced in the present, as a series of trips to Bombay, where the Amit of the novel grew up, and which he had willingly left. Amit does indeed have memories of the city, but does not really feel a part of it. He also has memories of a childhood friend, Ramu, who still lives there and whom he expects to see during the times the author visits, usually for a literary event. Chaudhuri's narrative,then, is written as a series of "discoveries" or sometimes rediscoveries of places he had been aware of or had experienced in the past. The author does not wish to create a "memoir" which would suggest that the past was being "recounted," but rather a kind of commentary on things he is doing in the moment along with the associations that these encounters bring to mind. Prominent among these is a visit to the Taj Mahal hotel, which had been the site of a terrorist attack in 2008, and which has since been largely restored. The author is in the area for the purpose of exchanging some shoes which his mother and wife have found unsatisfactory. Though there are some indirect references to the attack, most of the conversation between the author and the Joy Shoes proprietor focuses on the shoes sold there and the author's own references to his inclusion of the shop in one of his own novels, which the proprietor has apparently not read. History comes to us that way, Chaudhuri believes, "at the margins" of our experience.
Ramu himself, is not at the margins for the narrator, but he is no longer a central part of the narrator's life. "He's what survives of the familiar here," Amit notes, "he's what I don't need to think of unless he's absent." Amit is a successful writer who is married and has a young daughter. Ramu, who had been a talented gymnast but who had disdained the school's values, had seemed to treat failure "as a sport and the only thing he got better at." His life had followed paths utterly different from those which had brought satisfaction and success for Amit. Ramu had struggled with drug addiction, and still seemed to be drifting. He does not become close with Amit's family. It is obvious that Amit wants Ramu to be there when he visits, even if Ramu stays on the sidelines. We learn about Ramu in bits and pieces, as we do of the narrator himself.
Amit tells us that "the Ramu he knows and the Ramu he is writing about have become indistinguishable. The same's true of the Bombay I'm recounting from experience and the Bombay I'm assembling through words....There's a convergence. I live. Then something prompts me to write. The writing is not about life It is a form of living. The two happen simultaneously." This is the method which Chaudhuri uses, but which can prove puzzling to the reader.
Though the text fulfills the author's strategy of noticing details and creating a sense of the novel in which the present is always manifest even when the past is evoked, it did not bring either the city or the characters to vivid life for me. That might not be true for someone who had actually experienced Bombay, of course, but it did limit my response to it. Similarly, Ramu does seem to come to life only as a friend of the narrator's, and that narrator is satisfied to view others at a distance, without nostalgia. And yet, perhaps there is more to the narrator than is first apparent.
Despite his view that "school friends are like relatives; you can't deny that they were part of your growing up but they come to mean nothing to you,"both Ramu and Bombay appear to have real meaning for the narrator.
Indeed, this text is not a memoir in the sense Chaudhuri dislikes, but I wish he had created a more vivid personal narrative that would have resonated better with people unfamiliar with the look and culture of Bombay.
December 18, 2021
I found this to be a really interesting concept - an exploration of how place, people and past fit together - and it was quite readable, but as another reviewer commented I feel like it was probably more enjoyable for the author to write than it was for me to read. It relies a lot on description but I found it hard to visualise the places he described, and the lack of plot meant that the words washed over me without any sense of needing to understand the meaning. Cleverly written but not particularly compelling.
September 20, 2018
I don't quite understand what the book was. IT was neither a travelogue nor a biography. Nothing actually happens in the book. One can say, it's a play of emotional description. I would not deny that the author wrote a picture of sentiments, yet I did not feel the connection. A flow was missing in the writing and I found there was no purpose in writing the whole book instead it could be a series of newspaper columns or be moulded into a travelogue.
October 31, 2018
Christ what a slog.
April 30, 2023
Amit Chaudhuri’s novel Friend of My Youth is narrated by a character named Amit Chaudhuri, who is explicitly described as a work of fiction who just happens to have the same name as the author. Amit Chaudhuri (the character) is a novelist who has returned to the city of his youth to give readings of his new novel, which might or might not be in stock in any of the bookstores. He wants to spend time with his friend, Ramu, but Ramu is in rehab for a heroin addiction, so Amit is forced to explore the city on his own. The loneliness of seeing the old hotels and eating at the old restaurants by himself seeps through the narrative, making the journey through Bombay sad and dreary. Because, like everywhere, the city has changed, the hotel that he has stayed at his whole life has subtle but disheartening differences, and he wishes he could talk about these things to someone, particularly Ramu, because he would understand the way that Amit feels.
This is a short book, but it seems like such a long journey. Not much happens throughout the story, and Amit Chaudhuri (the writer) has made the journey as emotional as possible. The reader feels the state of mind that Amit Chaudhuri (the character) is in, the disappointment of reminiscing by himself about a city that is no longer the same as when he was young. This story is really a parallel narrative about all of his youth changing, his literal friend, Ramu, dealing with addiction and struggling to stay clean, and a metaphorical friend, Bombay, dealing with constant changes and struggling to stay clean. Both of them have changed for Amit, and these changes makes him wonder what has changed inside of him. The actual reaction past the nostalgia of a place he used to know is pretty neutral.
In the end, Friend of My Youth feels like a meditation on growing older and how everything changes. Whether it be a city, a friendship, or himself, the changes will never stop. Sometimes it is nice to go back and reminisce about youth, but the truth is that the present is more a more important subject of focus.
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This is a short book, but it seems like such a long journey. Not much happens throughout the story, and Amit Chaudhuri (the writer) has made the journey as emotional as possible. The reader feels the state of mind that Amit Chaudhuri (the character) is in, the disappointment of reminiscing by himself about a city that is no longer the same as when he was young. This story is really a parallel narrative about all of his youth changing, his literal friend, Ramu, dealing with addiction and struggling to stay clean, and a metaphorical friend, Bombay, dealing with constant changes and struggling to stay clean. Both of them have changed for Amit, and these changes makes him wonder what has changed inside of him. The actual reaction past the nostalgia of a place he used to know is pretty neutral.
In the end, Friend of My Youth feels like a meditation on growing older and how everything changes. Whether it be a city, a friendship, or himself, the changes will never stop. Sometimes it is nice to go back and reminisce about youth, but the truth is that the present is more a more important subject of focus.
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January 12, 2020
Friend of my Youth by Amit Chaudhuri is an elegantly written concise memoir. It perhaps falls into the category of creative non-fiction. The book has been received with much acclaim. I’d say, for a slim book, Friend of my Youth is certainly punching beyond its size. Amit Chaudhuri juxtaposes his impressions and experiences from a recent visit to Bombay with recollections of early life in the city. This device works for most part relatively seamlessly. It may have, however, risked becoming tedious if the memoir had been any longer.
By consistently referring to the city as Bombay rather than the current name Mumbai, Amit seems reluctant detach from his past, to memories of his formative years.
Three notable themes unfold in the memoir in interlacing ways : a childhood friendship that’s almost run its course; a landscape and social world that undergone sea-changes ; the posh Taj hotel which was once the favourite haunt of his parents, subsequently devasted by the terrorist attack of 2008, now fully restored and flaunting a business-as-usual stance.
There’s a pervasive sense of dis-ease at the core of the memoir. Amit had come with great expectation of reconnecting with his best friend of school year, to rekindling good times. But his friend who had remained homebound and faithful to Bombay, had fallen on hard times, his life had unravelled, he’d achieved little. Amit, on the other hand, had moved abroad and accomplishing much – wife, teenage daughter, a celebrated writing career and a secure university academic post. Yet he feels adrift, as if something’s lacking in his life. Each day of his current life unfolds and is spent in the same old way. Hence, the wistful, pensive and somewhat melancholy tone of the memoir.
By consistently referring to the city as Bombay rather than the current name Mumbai, Amit seems reluctant detach from his past, to memories of his formative years.
Three notable themes unfold in the memoir in interlacing ways : a childhood friendship that’s almost run its course; a landscape and social world that undergone sea-changes ; the posh Taj hotel which was once the favourite haunt of his parents, subsequently devasted by the terrorist attack of 2008, now fully restored and flaunting a business-as-usual stance.
There’s a pervasive sense of dis-ease at the core of the memoir. Amit had come with great expectation of reconnecting with his best friend of school year, to rekindling good times. But his friend who had remained homebound and faithful to Bombay, had fallen on hard times, his life had unravelled, he’d achieved little. Amit, on the other hand, had moved abroad and accomplishing much – wife, teenage daughter, a celebrated writing career and a secure university academic post. Yet he feels adrift, as if something’s lacking in his life. Each day of his current life unfolds and is spent in the same old way. Hence, the wistful, pensive and somewhat melancholy tone of the memoir.
May 13, 2025
Amit Chaudhuri has always impressed me with his poetic and lyrical writing style, which vividly brings his imagery and settings to life. There is a certain irreverence in his writing style - he follows his thoughts and doesn't conform to standards of characterisation or settings. Having read his short stories and three novellas, I find all his works enchanting. This book, "Friend of My Youth," is particularly compelling, as it reflects on his experiences in Bombay during visits for book readings or vacations, and Ramu, his childhood friend, is an integral part of Bombay.
The book doesn’t follow a chronological order; instead, it flows organically, with one memory triggering another, creating a rich tapestry of recollections. Many of these reflections resonated with me, especially his sentiments about growing up in a place he knew he would never settle in, feeling at home while imagining a future elsewhere. The author makes astute observations, such as the difference between poems and short stories, and novels.
I really enjoyed this book, though it might not appeal to everyone. However, as aspiring and published writers, you should give it a try. It offers a fascinating glimpse into a writer's life and thought process. I'd rate it 3.5/5.
The book doesn’t follow a chronological order; instead, it flows organically, with one memory triggering another, creating a rich tapestry of recollections. Many of these reflections resonated with me, especially his sentiments about growing up in a place he knew he would never settle in, feeling at home while imagining a future elsewhere. The author makes astute observations, such as the difference between poems and short stories, and novels.
I really enjoyed this book, though it might not appeal to everyone. However, as aspiring and published writers, you should give it a try. It offers a fascinating glimpse into a writer's life and thought process. I'd rate it 3.5/5.
January 12, 2025
another book in which a guy who is probably amit chaudhuri, except perhaps with respect to legal and/or tax liability, thinks about things while passing through a series of urban environments. I am always very frustrated by AC because on the one hand I think he is one of the best purveyors of the Sentence alive today, and I also think that he has that rare thing, a truly original understanding of some universal human experience (viz. nostalgia); but on the other hand there is always something about his fiction that fails to satisfy, and curiously, it does not seem to be the same something every time! in this particular book I think the problem may be sentimentality-avoidance — there is very clearly a strain in him that cavils at the idea of overt emotionality, which, well, who among us, but when the subject matter is so bursting with the urge to sentiment, there is a sort of inevitable bubble under the wallpaper. a lack of dynamic range, something like that.
December 11, 2025
I thought I was reading fiction, a novel like any other. I guess I believed that as much as anyone who first picked up this book. But it never really felt that way. My expectation from a novel is that at some point there will be a plot, with or without a twist. Here, though, it felt more like the author wanted this persona to tell his story, fragments of memory he no longer fully identifies with as his author self.
It wasn’t difficult to follow, just different. The experience felt like wandering through Bombay nothing but childhood memories of a stranger, not quite knowing where the journey would end, drifting through flashbacks and seemingly ordinary moments. Then again, nothing is truly mundane in the life of someone who chose to leave the place he was expected to stay forever simply because he grew up there. Places don’t let us go just because we stop returning or try to outrun them. Their streets and stones remain engraved in us. We breathed their air, and whenever we go back, it’s as if we never exhaled that breath; it had been waiting inside us the whole time.
Maybe the book offered me a perspective, one I shaped through thinking about it rather than from any plot it carried. In any case, it was a different read, at times rough, at times dreamlike.
It wasn’t difficult to follow, just different. The experience felt like wandering through Bombay nothing but childhood memories of a stranger, not quite knowing where the journey would end, drifting through flashbacks and seemingly ordinary moments. Then again, nothing is truly mundane in the life of someone who chose to leave the place he was expected to stay forever simply because he grew up there. Places don’t let us go just because we stop returning or try to outrun them. Their streets and stones remain engraved in us. We breathed their air, and whenever we go back, it’s as if we never exhaled that breath; it had been waiting inside us the whole time.
Maybe the book offered me a perspective, one I shaped through thinking about it rather than from any plot it carried. In any case, it was a different read, at times rough, at times dreamlike.
December 16, 2017
Mumbai was a deeply personal experience to me and I can relate to the author when he names the book 'Friend of My Youth' hinting, obviously, at the city of dreams and despair. This book is a moving tribute to South Bombay, its cobbled streets, Malabar Hills, Rhythm House, Chutney Sandwiches, Kala Ghoda and the Sea to name a few.
I was instantly hooked to the narrative as it reminded me of the numerous walks and times I have had in the area, in solitude or company. The narrator describes the nostalgia during a re-visit to the city that is heartfelt. This is also the story of Ramu, his only 'surviving' childhood friend in the city, who in a way, is a human incarnation of the city he lives in with all its tumultuous past and present reciprocating in his own life.
Highly recommended to readers who are aware of the city and its many characters and is in love with them.
I was instantly hooked to the narrative as it reminded me of the numerous walks and times I have had in the area, in solitude or company. The narrator describes the nostalgia during a re-visit to the city that is heartfelt. This is also the story of Ramu, his only 'surviving' childhood friend in the city, who in a way, is a human incarnation of the city he lives in with all its tumultuous past and present reciprocating in his own life.
Highly recommended to readers who are aware of the city and its many characters and is in love with them.
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