Neel Mukherjee in The Guardian:
In what sense are Amit Chaudhuri’s plotless meditations novels? Nothing, after all, happens in them; pages are expended describing, in exquisite prose, the cursive curl of a letter, or someone dozing off. Written seemingly out of life, these books are beautiful, intensely observed, yet static and inconsequential – more mood pieces than novels. That Chaudhuri has been pushing away at form, trying to make something new of the novel, may not have been obvious from his early work, but nowhere is his project more apparent than in his latest, Odysseus Abroad. Unfolding over the course of a single warm July day in London in 1985, the book follows a young Indian man, Ananda, in his early 20s, as he wakes up in his rented room in Warren Street, potters around, attends a tutorial – he is desultorily reading for a BA in English Literature – in UCL at midday, then goes to see his uncle, Rangamama, in the older man’s basement bedsit in Belsize Park. Uncle and nephew walk south for a bit, take the tube to Ananda’s, buying some Indian sweets en route, then go out to dinner at a curry house, after which they saunter back to Ananda’s room. That’s it. Yet everything happens in these 200 pages on different levels.
The level of the story first. Adhering closely for almost its entirety to Ananda’s point of view, the book necessarily gives him a rich, eloquent interiority. From his impatience with any pre-modernist literature, to his intense poetic ambitions (he wants to be another Larkin; there is a priceless account of a tutorial in which his poetic pretensions are gently sent up by his tutor); from his attachment to his mother, who has just returned home to India after a short visit, to the annoyance caused by his noisy neighbours: it is all rendered beautifully in Chaudhuri’s signature sentences. They are elegant and classical, rich in parentheses, subclauses and digressions; unexpected, surprising spaces open up within them to accommodate the ever‑present past and the infinite branching of thought.
More here.
