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Sojourn
The new novel about the present, the past, and the slippage between private and public life-from a writer who has 'like Proust, mastered the art of the moment.' (Hilary Mantel)
An unnamed man arrives in Berlin as a visiting professor. It is a place fused with Western history and cultural fracture lines. He moves along its streets and pavements; through its department stores, museums and restaurants. He befriends Faqrul, an enigmatic exiled poet, and Birgit, a woman with whom he shares the vagaries of attraction. He tries to understand his white-haired cleaner. Berlin is a riddle-he becomes lost not only in the city but in its legacy.
Sealed off in his own solitude, and as his visiting professorship passes, the narrator awaits transformation and meaning. Ultimately, he starts to understand that the less sure he becomes of his place in the moment, the more he knows his way.
An unnamed man arrives in Berlin as a visiting professor. It is a place fused with Western history and cultural fracture lines. He moves along its streets and pavements; through its department stores, museums and restaurants. He befriends Faqrul, an enigmatic exiled poet, and Birgit, a woman with whom he shares the vagaries of attraction. He tries to understand his white-haired cleaner. Berlin is a riddle-he becomes lost not only in the city but in its legacy.
Sealed off in his own solitude, and as his visiting professorship passes, the narrator awaits transformation and meaning. Ultimately, he starts to understand that the less sure he becomes of his place in the moment, the more he knows his way.
126 pages, Hardcover
First published August 25, 2022
20 people are currently reading
830 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 99 reviews
August 24, 2022
I quite liked this oblique, melancholy little novel of displacement. It never quite catches fire, but the 125 pages fly by and the writing is lovely throughout
January 28, 2023
What would I do if I knew what I saw was to be changed? Like turning a page in a book to a new story? Would I, then, believe what I ‘saw’? Hold onto the remnants like a testimonial to some unknown audit in future?
A Professor. His sojourn in Berlin. Chance meeting with an Exiled Poet. And a post-doctoral student. Many walks down long streets. Chilly with flushed cheeks. Nostalgic discoveries. Comforting incomprehension. Paused by quotidian hyphens. Experimenting with no practice. Connect and disconnect. Like a new language. Engage and disengage. All too good. Still alien.
Sitting in the gaps between arrival to and departure from a new city, ‘Sojourn’ quivers under the breeze of happenstances afforded by the blissful transience of it all. It gently prodded me to walk on paths not well-lit but fluctuating with promise. A trance-like walk in the fog of a new city. It teemed with a music that is loud in its mute notes. Sometimes, more often than less, such music is all I need.
A Professor. His sojourn in Berlin. Chance meeting with an Exiled Poet. And a post-doctoral student. Many walks down long streets. Chilly with flushed cheeks. Nostalgic discoveries. Comforting incomprehension. Paused by quotidian hyphens. Experimenting with no practice. Connect and disconnect. Like a new language. Engage and disengage. All too good. Still alien.
Sitting in the gaps between arrival to and departure from a new city, ‘Sojourn’ quivers under the breeze of happenstances afforded by the blissful transience of it all. It gently prodded me to walk on paths not well-lit but fluctuating with promise. A trance-like walk in the fog of a new city. It teemed with a music that is loud in its mute notes. Sometimes, more often than less, such music is all I need.
'We have an appetite for home, as flies do for food. We find it unerringly.’
September 5, 2022
The narrator of this novella is a visiting professor in Berlin. It’s a pleasant mysterious read as he meets people and explores, observing the history, different culture (I googled German toilets!), the different types of people particularly others that are displaced. He seems to get less sure of himself as it moves along and the writing becomes dreamier.
December 30, 2022
I tap out notes on the piano. I can't play, but its keys ring true. I go to the desk, press down on it. There are apartments opposite. Rather than being an observer, I tend to enter the lives of things I see. I'm now in that building. Mimicking myself, I look back from there to this window. I become a detail. When I move my gaze, I notice a man and a woman in a flat diagonally across. They're cooking. The man bends down to kiss her on the neck. Their universe is self-sufficient. They can't conceive of being watched; they think everyone is as deep in their world as they are. The woman tilts her head. Might they make love? I look away.
September 17, 2022
A great, slim read. It was slow and pensive with no plot. The narrator travels to Berlin as a visiting professor and during his time tries to connect with the city (both past and present) and some of the people. It reminded me of the Patrick Modiano I had read as a meditation of people just existing. Loved it.
January 10, 2025
3.5 stars
This quiet, spare story about an Indian writer's academic sojourn in Berlin in the early 2000s turned out to be a sombre way to start the year. The book has an unfinished feel owing to the fact that the narrator's own mental state seems to be unravelling as his time in the city nears an end. He makes friends with a Bangladeshi poet and has the hint of an affair with a German woman but remains disconnected. We learn little about his earlier life because he admittedly feels disconnected from it himself, making for a strange, yet beautifully written tale of a man lost in mid-life in a city that, even 15 years after reunification, has is still taking shape.
A longer review can be found here: https://roughghosts.com/2025/01/07/mo...
This quiet, spare story about an Indian writer's academic sojourn in Berlin in the early 2000s turned out to be a sombre way to start the year. The book has an unfinished feel owing to the fact that the narrator's own mental state seems to be unravelling as his time in the city nears an end. He makes friends with a Bangladeshi poet and has the hint of an affair with a German woman but remains disconnected. We learn little about his earlier life because he admittedly feels disconnected from it himself, making for a strange, yet beautifully written tale of a man lost in mid-life in a city that, even 15 years after reunification, has is still taking shape.
A longer review can be found here: https://roughghosts.com/2025/01/07/mo...
December 10, 2022
“We grew up in a free world, I said to him, a bit presumptuous. But there was an alternative, wasn’t there? And the fact that the free world had an alternative made it an alternative itself. We’d turn this over in our heads, like an equation. When freedom is the only reality, you’re no longer free.”
September 21, 2023
Kind of empty and probably easily forgettable. It didn’t stir the imagination or any feelings, but it had a very interesting structure which I appreciated.
November 22, 2022
Reading Sojourn felt like what happened to the unnamed protagonist. Disorienting, dislocation. Cocking my head towards a faint strain of melody-elusive yet familiar.
December 20, 2025
never quite managed to latch into this one unfortunately, but it's size made it a quick run and the writing style was nice
September 16, 2025
Boys will be boys. Wandering and wondering and winding through the compound displacement of an exile in a land without identity. Fascinating style. Every word surprises, unsettles. Fitting tone for the expat in silent crisis.
The world is so wide and then you read three books almost consecutively, independently, unintentionally, treating of loss and memory through muddled pilgrimages by the German countryside, and then the world is small and very small. It’s a lovely sort of modesty, a soft act of grace.
(“The Place of Shells” and, currently, “The Rings of Saturn”)
The world is so wide and then you read three books almost consecutively, independently, unintentionally, treating of loss and memory through muddled pilgrimages by the German countryside, and then the world is small and very small. It’s a lovely sort of modesty, a soft act of grace.
(“The Place of Shells” and, currently, “The Rings of Saturn”)
June 30, 2023
i mean, it was okayy. I enjoyed the beginning and middle, but the end really threw me off.
March 12, 2023
I was very bored with this book but still for some reason got very emotional at the end. I think it does what it aims to do flawlessly, but I don't think I'm the audience for this book. I usually like sort of slow slice of life meditations but I think I need a little more than this gave. I don't know! I don't know
October 14, 2022
Sojourn by Amit Chaudhuri
I couldn’t find the plot nor was there much action.
This review from the New York Review is very generous: ”An Indian writer has come to Berlin as a visiting professor. This is his second sojourn in the city, which seems strange, and also strangely familiar, to him. He is disoriented by its names, its immensity, and its history; he is worried that something may happen to him there. Faqrul, a friendly Bangladeshi poet living in exile, takes him up—then disappears. The visiting writer is increasingly adrift in a city that not long ago was two cities, each cut off from the other, much as the new unified city is cut off from the divided one of the past. It is the fall of 2005; every day it grows colder. The visitor is beginning to feel his middle age. To him, the new world of the twenty-first century, with its endless commodities from all over the place and no prospect of any sort of historical transformation, appears to exist in a state of amnesiac suspense. He gets involved with a woman, Birgit. He begins to miss his classes. He blacks out in the street. People are worried. “I’ve lost my bearings—not in the city; in its history,” he thinks. “The less sure I become of it, the more I know my way.” But does he?
Amit Chaudhuri’s Sojourn is a dramatic and disconcerting work of fiction, a book about the present as it slips into the past, a picture of a city and of a troubled mind, a historical novel about an ostensibly post-historical time, a story of haunting. Here, as in his earlier work, Chaudhuri pries open fictional form to explore questions of public and private life in ways that are both bold and subtle.”
I didn’t find this brief book bold; perhaps it was too subtle as I am not sure what it was about, other than the narrator, the Boell professor had issues with the toilet in his first apartment in Dahlem; I agree that Dahlem is less trendy than downtown Berlin, but I don’t need to read a strange novel to learn that.
I couldn’t find the plot nor was there much action.
This review from the New York Review is very generous: ”An Indian writer has come to Berlin as a visiting professor. This is his second sojourn in the city, which seems strange, and also strangely familiar, to him. He is disoriented by its names, its immensity, and its history; he is worried that something may happen to him there. Faqrul, a friendly Bangladeshi poet living in exile, takes him up—then disappears. The visiting writer is increasingly adrift in a city that not long ago was two cities, each cut off from the other, much as the new unified city is cut off from the divided one of the past. It is the fall of 2005; every day it grows colder. The visitor is beginning to feel his middle age. To him, the new world of the twenty-first century, with its endless commodities from all over the place and no prospect of any sort of historical transformation, appears to exist in a state of amnesiac suspense. He gets involved with a woman, Birgit. He begins to miss his classes. He blacks out in the street. People are worried. “I’ve lost my bearings—not in the city; in its history,” he thinks. “The less sure I become of it, the more I know my way.” But does he?
Amit Chaudhuri’s Sojourn is a dramatic and disconcerting work of fiction, a book about the present as it slips into the past, a picture of a city and of a troubled mind, a historical novel about an ostensibly post-historical time, a story of haunting. Here, as in his earlier work, Chaudhuri pries open fictional form to explore questions of public and private life in ways that are both bold and subtle.”
I didn’t find this brief book bold; perhaps it was too subtle as I am not sure what it was about, other than the narrator, the Boell professor had issues with the toilet in his first apartment in Dahlem; I agree that Dahlem is less trendy than downtown Berlin, but I don’t need to read a strange novel to learn that.
August 24, 2022
This neat little book by esteemed author Chaudhuri could be read in one sitting. It’s neither plot driven nor character driven (unless you count Berlin as a character) but it’s very much an in-the-moment, observational novel. It reminded me of Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri but Chaudhuri has also been compared to Proust, if that’s your thing.
An unnamed professor takes up a guest post at a university in Berlin and settles into city life, befriending a Bangladeshi man and a German woman. As he navigates life in a new city, he observes the idiosyncrasies of German life (notably, the shelf shitter toilets 😂 (nb he doesn’t call them this - it’s what myself and friends used to call them when I lived in Germany in my 20s).
A nice bit of nostalgia for me, with cute references to Peek & Cloppenburg, and familiar U-Bahn stations and street names. I can’t help but think this might be pretty dull for most readers. Reading it is a little like watching a quiet documentary, there’s a meditative quality to it.
Go for it if you’ve ever lived in Germany and/or you’re a fan of Proust or quiet arty documentaries in literary format. Just don’t expect anything to happen and you won’t be disappointed. 3/5 ⭐️
*Sojourn will be published on 25 August 2022. I read an advance copy courtesy of the publisher @faberbooks via @netgalley (many thanks). As always, this is an honest review.*
An unnamed professor takes up a guest post at a university in Berlin and settles into city life, befriending a Bangladeshi man and a German woman. As he navigates life in a new city, he observes the idiosyncrasies of German life (notably, the shelf shitter toilets 😂 (nb he doesn’t call them this - it’s what myself and friends used to call them when I lived in Germany in my 20s).
A nice bit of nostalgia for me, with cute references to Peek & Cloppenburg, and familiar U-Bahn stations and street names. I can’t help but think this might be pretty dull for most readers. Reading it is a little like watching a quiet documentary, there’s a meditative quality to it.
Go for it if you’ve ever lived in Germany and/or you’re a fan of Proust or quiet arty documentaries in literary format. Just don’t expect anything to happen and you won’t be disappointed. 3/5 ⭐️
*Sojourn will be published on 25 August 2022. I read an advance copy courtesy of the publisher @faberbooks via @netgalley (many thanks). As always, this is an honest review.*
August 26, 2022
This neat little book by esteemed author Chaudhuri could be read in one sitting. It’s neither plot driven nor character driven (unless you count Berlin as a character) but it’s very much an in-the-moment, observational novel. It reminded me of Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri but Chaudhuri has also been compared to Proust, if that’s your thing.
An unnamed professor takes up a guest post at a university in Berlin and settles into city life, befriending a Bangladeshi man and a German woman. As he navigates life in a new city, he observes the idiosyncrasies of German life (notably, the shelf shitter toilets (nb he doesn’t call them this - it’s what myself and friends used to call them when I lived in Germany in my 20s).
A nice bit of nostalgia for me, with cute references to Peek & Cloppenburg, and familiar U-Bahn stations and streetscapes, but I can’t help but think this could be pretty dull for most readers. Reading it is a little like watching a quiet documentary, there’s a meditative quality to it.
Go for it if you’ve ever lived in Germany and/or you’re a fan of Proust or quiet arty documentaries in literary format. Just don’t expect anything to happen and you won’t be disappointed. 3/5 ⭐️
An unnamed professor takes up a guest post at a university in Berlin and settles into city life, befriending a Bangladeshi man and a German woman. As he navigates life in a new city, he observes the idiosyncrasies of German life (notably, the shelf shitter toilets (nb he doesn’t call them this - it’s what myself and friends used to call them when I lived in Germany in my 20s).
A nice bit of nostalgia for me, with cute references to Peek & Cloppenburg, and familiar U-Bahn stations and streetscapes, but I can’t help but think this could be pretty dull for most readers. Reading it is a little like watching a quiet documentary, there’s a meditative quality to it.
Go for it if you’ve ever lived in Germany and/or you’re a fan of Proust or quiet arty documentaries in literary format. Just don’t expect anything to happen and you won’t be disappointed. 3/5 ⭐️
August 6, 2023
A slight, melancholy novel about displacement, the feeling of being in a new place (in this case, Berlin) and not quite belonging - filling time and making deep but temporary connections with people. The writing is beautiful and I like the way Chaudhuri plays with themes of solitude, and looking for meaning, and also how the strange bureaucracies and logics of academia are represented. But I felt that the novel still somehow fell short of what it could have been - meandering but maybe with a little too little direction.
August 4, 2022
Sojourn follows an unnamed narrator, an exiled Bangladeshi poet and a woman whom the narrator shares an attraction. The book was an easy, short read, following the narrator meandering through Berlin. In terms of plot, not much happens, but despite this, it still made an interesting read - the characters weren’t particularly well fleshed out but Berlin itself was wrote really well.
Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers Fabre and Fabre LTD for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.
Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers Fabre and Fabre LTD for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.
June 4, 2024
3.5
an interesting collection of field notes from (west)berlin in the early 2000s whose observations touch on many truths despite being full of geographic miscalculations (subway lines that run differently in real life than what is described in the text, impossible viewpoints from buildings that don’t exist). the berlin evoked by chaudhouri is familiar by memory but fading more each year, just like the narrator’s sense of self.
an interesting collection of field notes from (west)berlin in the early 2000s whose observations touch on many truths despite being full of geographic miscalculations (subway lines that run differently in real life than what is described in the text, impossible viewpoints from buildings that don’t exist). the berlin evoked by chaudhouri is familiar by memory but fading more each year, just like the narrator’s sense of self.
August 22, 2023
Picks up for me more so in the middle, but one of the first serious pieces which indulges in asking about the allure of performing fetish (+ in a non american context)? Very subtle with it tho, could have done more...perhaps there is more if i really dig my brain about it
January 13, 2024
Picked this up from a small local bookshop, not really sure why I drew to this, yet I really enjoyed it. I don’t always step out of my usual reads, but finding a quaint book such as this has made me realise how much I love the anonymity of some books.
——
“When freedom is the only reality, you’re no longer free.”
——
“When freedom is the only reality, you’re no longer free.”
April 16, 2024
Just over 100 pages
This tender story is set Berlin & told in present tense - a small part of his life, reflective of the past history of the city and current encounters of acquaintances
Beautifully written
This tender story is set Berlin & told in present tense - a small part of his life, reflective of the past history of the city and current encounters of acquaintances
Beautifully written
March 2, 2025
Spare and engrossing. Short and weird but more in the telling than the story itself. Made me curious about Berlin and east Germany (already true) but also the way that history will manifest in surroundings and how they feel. Also had to google a bunch of words while reading which was kind of awesome —I need to get back to keeping a diary of the words I learn reading
October 3, 2025
The narrator of this spare text is a Böll Visiting Professor experiencing disorientation yet resisting gestures of familiarity. Like a Teju Cole or Rachel Cusk protagonist, his personality only seeps in through his wanderings and conversations. After his first talk, he meets a fellow Indian from the audience, Faqrul Haq, who takes it upon himself to be his dedicated tour guide. The narrator isn’t entirely sure how he feels about Faqrul, yet meets him for meals and seeks his advice about the best place to buy warm outerwear. An expat friend is a crutch he wishes he could refuse, but the bewilderment of being somewhere you don’t speak the language at all is such that he feels bound to accept. Meanwhile, there is the possibility of another academic admirer, Birgit, becoming his lover. Strangely, his relationship with his cleaning lady, who addresses him only in German, seems the healthiest one on offer. As the book goes on, the chapters get shorter and shorter, presaging some kind of mental crisis. “I keep walking – in which direction I’m not sure; Kreuzberg? I’ve lost my bearings – not in the city; in its history. The less sure I become of it, the more I know my way.” This was interesting, even admirable, but I wanted more story.
Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck
Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck
October 26, 2025
So uncaptivating
November 23, 2022
An unnamed visiting professor arrives for a guest stint in Berlin. And then you, the reader, are given the opportunity to follow him along through his days of socializing, shopping, etc.
The book is slightly more exciting than that sounds due to a strong sense of place and meditations on East and West Berlin’s differences, but overall, there’s not much to this slim novel.
It’s very much a mood work, so if you’re in a mood for a quiet well written tale, it might work…and if you’re not…well, it reads very quickly.
The book is slightly more exciting than that sounds due to a strong sense of place and meditations on East and West Berlin’s differences, but overall, there’s not much to this slim novel.
It’s very much a mood work, so if you’re in a mood for a quiet well written tale, it might work…and if you’re not…well, it reads very quickly.
September 6, 2022
So there are books that grip you. There are books that drive you to distraction. There are books that make you laugh. There are characters that you want to make your friend, your mother, your lover ……
And then there are quiet books. Books that demand little of you. Short books that take you on a little meander through the pages. Sojourn is a beautiful little book which enables you to sojourn awhile with the author & take a trip around Berlin.
This is not a book of plot. It’s a ramble. A walk amongst streets, looking, listening & taking in the everyday. We are aboard a nameless narrator as he travels adrift amongst those streets.
A visiting professor. The places he encounters. The people he sees. He demands little. This book will demand little of you except an enjoyment of Chaudhri’s prose.
If you want a break from your pacy or your racey reads then pull up a chair, grab a coffee & let these beautiful words wash over you for an hour or so. Then get back at it 😊
Thank you to @netgalley & the publisher for an arc in return for an honest review
August 26, 2023
for being sad with me
October 21, 2022
Perfect at the art of moment, as Hilary Mantel said.
Sojourn means a short stay at a place that is not your home. That's exactly what this story is about. Narrator of Sojourn is an India based professor arriving in Berlin, sharing his experience real time with us.
I haven't read Proust, but Mantel has compared Amit's work with Proust- where small moments take over the story, and I'm so much in agreement. The narrator at one point says that he is usually in the past but when in Berlin he's always in the present. That's how he is amazed and excited and curious and furious about his walk through of Berlin. Although he lies as the story of Sojourn is a walk through of the narrator in the streets of Berlin and how he is always taken to the last. After a point this bankrupt city remains him of things he's not even sure about.
Chaudhuri talks about the contemporary times with giving references of the past - like he goes back to the holocaust quite often, sometimes it's about something as silly as how his teeth were broken by a right wing fringe group or about an old Benz. It's not just about Berlin's past, it's about his past too. The travel experience of the professor is so immersive, reading it in one-go would be an experience to remember. The narrator is subtle about important topics like the right wing fringe of Germany, about what we should learn from the history, about how anytime there could be an American invasion of this bankrupt city, he's subtle about the shameless behaviour of this ex-Muslim he meets in Berlin.
Faqrul is a well depicted character in this book who is a Bangladeshi poet, an ex-Muslim who was forced to leave his country on the charge of blasphemy, he's sort of this tour guide of the narrator throughout his trip. Oh, there's also Birgit. A woman the narrator falls in love with. They do not make love in the story although I'm sure both did have it in their mind. Everytime they met. Wouldn't expand on her much as even the author didn't care to, for this is a short 120 paged travel experience
Sojourn was nice, Sojourn was sweet, more of. Although it felt incomplete. His travel felt incomplete. His love with Birgit felt incomplete. Berlin itself felt incomplete (the raw in-the-moment experience was great I'd say) but otherwise the story would raise a lot of questions without answering any.
Maybe that's how it is in this genre? I have to read more of Chaudhuri and Proust too to understand. I'm still a baby reader as my friend used to call me. A good reading experience, nonetheless. I'd rate it a good number.
Sojourn means a short stay at a place that is not your home. That's exactly what this story is about. Narrator of Sojourn is an India based professor arriving in Berlin, sharing his experience real time with us.
I haven't read Proust, but Mantel has compared Amit's work with Proust- where small moments take over the story, and I'm so much in agreement. The narrator at one point says that he is usually in the past but when in Berlin he's always in the present. That's how he is amazed and excited and curious and furious about his walk through of Berlin. Although he lies as the story of Sojourn is a walk through of the narrator in the streets of Berlin and how he is always taken to the last. After a point this bankrupt city remains him of things he's not even sure about.
Chaudhuri talks about the contemporary times with giving references of the past - like he goes back to the holocaust quite often, sometimes it's about something as silly as how his teeth were broken by a right wing fringe group or about an old Benz. It's not just about Berlin's past, it's about his past too. The travel experience of the professor is so immersive, reading it in one-go would be an experience to remember. The narrator is subtle about important topics like the right wing fringe of Germany, about what we should learn from the history, about how anytime there could be an American invasion of this bankrupt city, he's subtle about the shameless behaviour of this ex-Muslim he meets in Berlin.
Faqrul is a well depicted character in this book who is a Bangladeshi poet, an ex-Muslim who was forced to leave his country on the charge of blasphemy, he's sort of this tour guide of the narrator throughout his trip. Oh, there's also Birgit. A woman the narrator falls in love with. They do not make love in the story although I'm sure both did have it in their mind. Everytime they met. Wouldn't expand on her much as even the author didn't care to, for this is a short 120 paged travel experience
Sojourn was nice, Sojourn was sweet, more of. Although it felt incomplete. His travel felt incomplete. His love with Birgit felt incomplete. Berlin itself felt incomplete (the raw in-the-moment experience was great I'd say) but otherwise the story would raise a lot of questions without answering any.
Maybe that's how it is in this genre? I have to read more of Chaudhuri and Proust too to understand. I'm still a baby reader as my friend used to call me. A good reading experience, nonetheless. I'd rate it a good number.
September 24, 2022
It was refreshing to read a fiction by Amit Chaudhuri after so many years. While reading, I realised how much I had loved 'A Strange and Sublime Address' and missed his prose all this time. Written in short, crisp sentences emitting the general aura of the novella, Chaudhuri's latest work follows the life of a professor who's come for a short academic stint, or a sojourn in Berlin. Upon his arrival he is confronted with distant loudness and the quaint stuffiness of the city reeking of a world that was made and unmade like a bed being used diurnally. He meets a fellow-Bengali speaking man, who reminds him of the invasive hospitality he'd left behind in Kolkata. His research interests draws him toward a couple of other people at his university and outside who are taken by his work in India's modernity. Although the protagonist seems fairly unsure, nebulous about what he exactly wants from his stint here in Germany, he lets the place and its people take 'charge' of him as they extend an invite. By most things he's unmoved, already well-versed in the history of the gloomy city speckled with people from every ethnicity and race. But somewhere, behind the layers of Chaudhuri's words, we see the professor making Germany and its history inside his head. There is a time-space construction being carried out as he confronts the mundane and himself in its very mundanity. Sometimes, its almost Kantian, his conception of the space, its a priori nature and the depictions one's minds project filtered through culture. At the face of it, as some reviewers have written, it may come across as a plotless book but the author, here, is interested more than what an all-encompassing plot can offer. A plot limits, it makes prose follow a single direction, sometimes leading to rapid changes than a slow unfurling of time. In 'Sojourn', the plot is the title itself, it is contemporary Germany, it is the professor's steady, processual incline toward the end of his stay. Loved it and would certainly read it again, someday soon.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 99 reviews