Odysseus Abroad
A novel
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
From the widely acclaimed writer, a beguiling new novel, at once wistful and ribald, about a day in the life of two Indian men in London--a university student and his bachelor uncle--each coping in his own way with alienation, solitariness, and the very art of living.
It is 1985. Twenty-two-year-old Ananda has been in London for two years, practicing at being a poet. He's homesick, thinks of himself as an inveterate outsider, and yet he can't help feeling that there's something romantic, even poetic, in his isolation. His uncle, Radhesh, a magnificent failure who lives in genteel impoverishment and celibacy, has been in London for nearly three decades. Odysseus Abroad follows them on one of their weekly, familiar forays about town. The narrative surface has the sensual richness that has graced all of Amit Chaudhuri's work. But the great charm and depth of the novel reside in Ananda's far-ranging ruminations (into the triangle between his mother, father, and Radhesh--his mother's brother, his father's best friend; his Sylheti/Bengali ancestry; the ambitions and pressures that rest on his shoulders); in Radhesh's often artfully wielded idiosyncrasies; and in the spiky, needful, sometimes comical, yet ultimately loving connection between the two men.
This eBook edition includes a reading group guide.
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.
