Odysseus Abroad

I can see why this book would not be for some people. I love narratives with lovely language and thoughtful rumination, even without a powerful plot. As a woman with a nephew just Ananda's age, I did find the nephew-uncle dynamic very interesting. Although the novel explicitly evokes Joyce's Ulysses......more

Joyce set out to neuter the epic-ness of Homer's grand story, to show that the mundane lives of people may mimic that story. And he developed a new way to describe mundanity; his syntatical innovations changed literature for ever. Chaudhuri, one would assume, shares the first ambition, for he too la......more

I adored it from start to finish. I loved that it was plotless, I loved the musings on identity and literature, especially as it pertains to colonialism. The subtleties of seeking home away from home and not quite finding it, the mannerisms of locals that are initially imperceptible but speak to a t......more

A well-written meditation on culture This short book gives all the pleasures of a well-written memoir. Yes, I know it is labeled a novel, and if I were to look up the biography of the Indian-born author, now a professor at the University of East Anglia, I would find many differences between his life......more

Ananda is adrift in London, where he is a kind of non-heroic Odysseus--or maybe a Telemachus--making decidedly short journeys with his uncle in a world almost as strange, at least to him, as the world through which Homer's Odyssey takes us. His journeys only lead back to his bedsit, where he strives......more