AT HOME IN THE WORLD

Amit Chaudhuri's new novel is short, but its themes of identity, history and memory are all copious

- Aditya Mani Jha

For a lot of major writers like Don DeLillo or Philip Roth, their novels become shorter and more impressionistic towards the latter stages of their careers—as style crystallises with age, brevity becomes an embedded virtue of sorts.

Amit Chaudhuri, however, has been writing these short, observational, impeccably crafted short novels since the beginning of his career; his first, A Strange and Sublime Address, was published in 1991. Three decades later, the observations remain razor-sharp and the sentences as languorously beautiful as ever.

Chaudhuri’s latest book, a short novel called Sojourn, follows the unnamed protagonist through a six-month residency in Berlin circa 2005, a guest professorship. He isn’t sure whether he has been to this city before—and of course, less than two decades ago, this was actually two cities, before the Cold War ended and the Berlin Wall fell. Almost every encounter he has—whether it’s with Faqrul, the Bangladeshi writer, or Geeta, the Bengali German postcolonial scholar, or Birgit, a woman he’s kind-of sort-of involved with— leaves him disoriented and second-guessing himself in one way or another. Identity, history and the porosity of memory are all major themes in this allusive novel.

During a video interview, Chaudhuri tells India today, “It’s an attempt to make sense out of my response not only to Berlin, but also to a foreign city that feels curiously intimate to the person who arrives there. To make sense of an odd intimation of having arrived at home, to recognise that this history before me is somehow also my history.”