Showing results by author "Amit Chaudhuri" in All Categories

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. 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.

Amit Chaudhuri, novelist, critic, and essayist, is also a musician, trained in the Indian classical vocal tradition but equally fluent as a guitarist and singer in the American folk music style, who has recorded his experimental compositions extensively and performed around the world. A turning point in his life took place when, as a lonely teenager living in a high-rise in Bombay, far from his family's native Calcutta, he began, contrary to all his prior inclinations, to study Indian classical music.

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 outsider, and yet 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.