Odysseus Abroad, by Amit Chaudhuri, is an exceptionally intelligent novel, often funny, sometimes sad, about a young man from India who’s gone to London to study towards a Ph.D. in twentieth century English poetry. He has an uncle living in London, retired, and periodic visits from his mother from India are a routine part of his life and education (and meal plan). The analogy to Odysseus is delicious; we have a wandering Indian, here, more or less at sea in London, and different chapters of this novel, which all takes place in one day, reflect different aspects of the original wandering white man, in this context, but we’re able to understand the difficulties and complexities of English life on this sensitive and lonely young Indian thrust into The West. His support bases as a person include mainly this uncle, whose habits and conversations are preordained, repetitive, maddening, and yet oddly soothing for our young Odysseus. Cheap Indian restaurants also are an important grounding device for our hero/narrator, and his complaints about how Indian food in London doesn’t taste ‘right’ are a hilarious reversal on the American abroad, complaining that, say, Italian food in Italy isn’t Italian by their standards (the local pizzeria back in America).
Ananda, the narrator, is also surrounded in the one room he rents in a much divided house in Bloomsbury, by noisy Indians and a Londoner, up all night and sleeping all day, while he tries to keep his Classical Indian musical abilities going (he sings in the morning), and he reads poetry voraciously much of the rest of the day. His interactions with various members of the faculty at the university he attends are truly hilarious: Classical/Romantic Indian poet/dreamer meets Postmodern Feminist, Medievalists who hate poetry, who try to persuade him that poetry’s about words only, not ideas, and other postmodern theoretical stuff that pervades Western academic life. Ananda’s confusion–his cultural reference points are Indian, not Western–is part of the delight of this novel, as we really are able to understand his inability to understand what his tutors and teachers are talking about; it’s his very cluelessness as a Western academic that will save him in the end, we presume. And because Ananda is Indian, these tutors are extra careful when they critique his own poetry, or poetry in general (the divided English department shows the usual contempt from one field of study to another amongst the faculty, with academic viciousness just under the surface and sailing right over Ananda’s head. These faculty members are polite–diversity, after all, is part of their schtick, but almost always patronizing to Ananda; parts of this novel reminded me of David Lodge’s swipes at academia in so many of his often hilarious novels. But the overall tone in Odysseus Abroad is one of douceur, of that isolated loneliness so common to the ‘foreigner’ abroad: thus the analogy to Odysseus. Ananda’s uncle is health and food obsessed, a virgin well into his sixties; much is made of his bathroom habits, and the purging effects of certain foods and the like. Ananda is both infuriated and comforted by these rituals from his past home life.
At the end of this one day, Ananda and his uncle eat in an Indian restaurant, and they discover that the server they have is originally from the same small village as the uncle, and the conversation amongst these three men, and their delight in finding one another and understanding shared cultural references, is delightful and bittersweet, concurrently. A great deal is made of differences amongst Bengali Indians–that reading of provincialism seems to be a universal one, much like The Odyssey is. But Ananda’s near complete isolation from his academic peers (he keeps getting new tutors constantly; one gets the sense that the faculty keeps shuffling him from one to another, because of his refusal to hate contemporary English poetry, or interpret it in postmodern critical discourse.
At the conclusion of this novel, after a day of reading, music, wanderings through a Bengali festival, and endless chatter from the uncle, Chaudhuri makes some cultural comparisons that truly resonate, almost shock, with their possible veracities. Four castes have existed for centuries in India, the Brahman (the philosophers), the Kshatriya (the warriors); the Vaishya (the merchants) , and the Shudra (the beggars, or untouchables). These four categories are allegorized by the author through the character of the uncle as follows: the philosophers were the ancient Indians; the warriors and aristocrats were the Romans (including the aristocratic sponsoring of the arts; they “nurtured value and beauty and the arts”. The ‘merchant’ era is given to the English, “the ascendancy and rule of the shopkeeper, the burgher, who might possess an Empire but whose outlook was essentially humdrum, middle-level, and suburban). And “the last age: the shudra’s–in which the man on the street was illusorily empowered……It was a toss-up whether ….the epoch belonged to Russia or America. It would seem America. For this would be the epoch nominally of the common man, but really of capitalism and popular culture. Everyone would be famous. And after this final phase…….what?”….
Odysseus, Western or Eastern, has now wandered through these four cyles, each devolving from its antecedents: Odysseus Abroad is heading in this direction all along, and the novel’s thus a singularly astute critique of where we are today, in a kind of neither here nor there place, people wandering powerlessly into new lands, longing for the sentiment of the old, forever getting on a plane or a boat, hoping for a better life, in an endless journey perhaps without purpose. Odysseus Abroad is a very intelligent, well written, often funny, sometimes biting novel, but it’s one of the best books about the immigrant experience, seen from the point of view of the ambivalent immigrant, not that of the host, who always, always, expects endless gratitude, which always, always induces contempt.
–Daniel Brown
Odysseus Abroad, by Amit Chaudhuri, is an exceptionally intelligent novel, often funny, sometimes sad, about a young man from India who’s gone to London to study towards a Ph.D. in twentieth century English poetry. He has an uncle living in London, retired, and periodic visits from his mother from India are a routine part of his life and education (and meal plan). The analogy to Odysseus is delicious; we have a wandering Indian, here, more or less at sea in London, and different chapters of this novel, which all takes place in one day, reflect different aspects of the original wandering white man, in this context, but we’re able to understand the difficulties and complexities of English life on this sensitive and lonely young Indian thrust into The West. His support bases as a person include mainly this uncle, whose habits and conversations are preordained, repetitive, maddening, and yet oddly soothing for our young Odysseus. Cheap Indian restaurants also are an important grounding device for our hero/narrator, and his complaints about how Indian food in London doesn’t taste ‘right’ are a hilarious reversal on the American abroad, complaining that, say, Italian food in Italy isn’t Italian by their standards (the local pizzeria back in America).
Ananda, the narrator, is also surrounded in the one room he rents in a much divided house in Bloomsbury, by noisy Indians and a Londoner, up all night and sleeping all day, while he tries to keep his Classical Indian musical abilities going (he sings in the morning), and he reads poetry voraciously much of the rest of the day. His interactions with various members of the faculty at the university he attends are truly hilarious: Classical/Romantic Indian poet/dreamer meets Postmodern Feminist, Medievalists who hate poetry, who try to persuade him that poetry’s about words only, not ideas, and other postmodern theoretical stuff that pervades Western academic life. Ananda’s confusion–his cultural reference points are Indian, not Western–is part of the delight of this novel, as we really are able to understand his inability to understand what his tutors and teachers are talking about; it’s his very cluelessness as a Western academic that will save him in the end, we presume. And because Ananda is Indian, these tutors are extra careful when they critique his own poetry, or poetry in general (the divided English department shows the usual contempt from one field of study to another amongst the faculty, with academic viciousness just under the surface and sailing right over Ananda’s head. These faculty members are polite–diversity, after all, is part of their schtick, but almost always patronizing to Ananda; parts of this novel reminded me of David Lodge’s swipes at academia in so many of his often hilarious novels. But the overall tone in Odysseus Abroad is one of douceur, of that isolated loneliness so common to the ‘foreigner’ abroad: thus the analogy to Odysseus. Ananda’s uncle is health and food obsessed, a virgin well into his sixties; much is made of his bathroom habits, and the purging effects of certain foods and the like. Ananda is both infuriated and comforted by these rituals from his past home life.
At the end of this one day, Ananda and his uncle eat in an Indian restaurant, and they discover that the server they have is originally from the same small village
as the uncle, and the conversation amongst these three men, and their delight in finding one another and understanding shared cultural references, is delightful and
bittersweet, concurrently. A great deal is made of differences amongst Bengali Indians–that reading of provincialism seems to be a universal one, much like The Odyssey is.
But Ananda’s near complete isolation from his academic peers (he keeps getting new tutors constantly; one gets the sense that the faculty keeps shuffling him from one
to another, because of his refusal to hate contemporary English poetry, or interpret it in postmodern critical discourse.
At the conclusion of this novel, after a day of reading, music, wanderings through a Bengali festival, and endless chatter from the uncle, Chaudhuri makes some cultural comparisons that truly resonate, almost shock, with their possible veracities. Four castes have existed for centuries in India, the Brahman (the philosophers), the Kshatriya (the warriors); the Vaishya (the merchants) , and the Shudra (the beggars, or untouchables). These four categories are allegorized by the author through the character of the uncle as follows: the philosophers were the ancient Indians; the warriors and aristocrats were the Romans (including the aristocratic sponsoring of the arts; they “nurtured value and beauty and the arts”. The ‘merchant’ era is given to the English, “the ascendancy and rule of the shopkeeper, the burgher, who might possess an Empire but whose outlook was essentially humdrum, middle-level, and suburban). And “the last age: the shudra’s–in which the man on the street was illusorily empowered……It was a toss-up whether ….the epoch belonged to Russia or America. It would seem America. For this would be the
epoch nominally of the common man, but really of capitalism and popular culture. Everyone would be famous. And after this final phase…….what?”….
Odysseus, Western or Eastern, has now wandered through these four cyles, each devolving from its antecedents: Odysseus Abroad is heading in this direction all along, and the novel’s thus a singularly astute critique of where we are today, in a kind of neither here nor there place, people wandering powerlessly into new lands, longing for the sentiment of the old, forever getting on a plane or a boat, hoping for a better life, in an endless journey perhaps without purpose. Odysseus Abroad is a very intelligent, well written, often funny, sometimes biting novel, but it’s one of the best books about the immigrant experience, seen from the point of view of the ambivalent immigrant, not that of the host, who always, always, expects endless gratitude, which always, always induces contempt.