Odysseus Abroad
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
It’s 1985. Twenty-two-year-old Ananda has been a student in London for two years, practicing at being a poet. He's homesick, thinks of himself as an inveterate outsider, and yet he can't help feeling that there is something romantic about his isolation. His uncle, Radhesh is a magnificent failure and an eccentric virgin who has lived in genteel impoverishment in Hampstead for nearly three decades.
Over the course of one day, we follow Ananda and Radhesh on one of their weekly forays about town. Weaving back and forth in time, Chaudhuri gradually reveals the background to the two men’s lives with deft precision and humour as they walk through London together, circling around their respective pasts and futures, and finding in one another an unspoken solace.
Written in a voice that is tender, wry and unsentimental, Odysseus Abroad is a lyrical and modern exploration of loneliness and failure – as well as a love letter to Homer and Joyce – by one of our most celebrated writers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Chaudhuri's (Afternoon Raag) latest novel, set in the world of Bengali expats living in Thatcher-era London, is a gently humorous book that riffs on Homer's Iliad and Joyce's Ulysses. Eschewing a traditional narrative arc, Chaudhuri primarily explores the friendship between Ananda, a 22-year-old Bengali expat and student of English literature, and his uncle, Radhesh, who is obsessed with the workings of his gastrointestinal and urinary tracts. As the duo wander the streets of England's capital city, they discuss love and sex, race and empire, and notions of exile and exclusion. Descriptive details are richly evocative of 1980s London, a quotidian world of teabags, cheese and pickle sandwiches, and bland television shows all marred by the ubiquity of racism, skinheads, neo-Nazis, and anti-immigrant sentiment. Both men are homesick, although Radhesh denies his longing to return to his native land. As Ananda ponders viraha, a poetic term referring to a separation from something beloved, Radhesh longs to be somewhere where he is not defined by the continent in which he was born. The frustrated yearning to belong somewhere, anywhere reverberates plaintively throughout.
