A single summer’s day is the time frame of author and musician Amit Chaudhuri’s engrossing sixth novel which, like Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway, uses a day in the life of its characters to show “a life in the day”. Rarely does Chaudhuri’s pensive protagonist fully inhabit the present moment, instead mulling over the past or fearing the future in an ambitious streams-of-consciousness narrative in which a modernist sensibility is everywhere apparent.
This richly allusive novel is also a playful pastiche of Homer’s Odyssey: the dynamic between its entertaining main characters – English literature student Ananda and his eccentric uncle Rangamama – cleverly echoes Odysseus’s relationship with his son Telemachus. It is not the novel’s plot, but its rhythmic prose, interwoven with musical and poetical references, that most engages.
“What exactly should I do today?” wonders the insomniac Ananda one day in 1985, a day beginning with “the usual feeling of dread”. Struggling to find his feet in London, Ananda passes the time walking through the city with his uncle, who lives in a basement bedsit and seeks succour in song lyrics. The walking proves an excellent device for Chaudhuri to continue his exploration of urban landscapes, a theme of both his fiction and nonfiction. Here, the Odyssean journey home – in this case to Warren Street – unfolds several other journeys within journeys: geographical ones, from Sylhet in Bangladesh to Shillong in India to London; emotional journeys recovering from inappropriate crushes; physiological journeys of food through the body.
In a witty narrative filled with wandering and wondering, walking gives the homesick hero plenty of time to contemplate the nature of belonging, of how to feel at home within a foreign city, and also within our own skin.
Oddyseus Abroad is published by Oneworld (£14.99). Click here to order it for £11.99
