The lonely odyssey on the streets of 1985 London

“Odysseus Abroad” by Amit Chaudhuri (Knopf, 204 pages $24)

Fiction comes in many forms and achieves many aims. It may entertain us, inform us, take us to new worlds, introduce us to characters that are either strange to us or serve as a mirror to our own lives.

“Odysseus Abroad,” Amit Chaudhuri’s new novel, does something else. Like a camera, it looks at mundane life around us and presents the reflections of one character, Ananda, a 22-year-old Indian student in London in 1985.

While the novel’s title brings to mind Homer’s hero, Ananda is a lonely young man in an apartment in Bloomsbury where his neighbors keep him awake late at night. He broods about race and sex and wants to be a “young man of letters.” He reads poetry, modern poetry; he doesn’t like the literature his teachers assign him that’s written before the 19th century.

He loves light. “His main education in England was imparted by the day itself, his phases of awkwardness and happiness in its fourteen or fifteen hours, and, as a result, the realization that he adored light – and sound.”

The novel’s title also reminds us of Joyce’s “Ulysses.” Like that major novel, this one takes place on a single day. However, Chaudhuri’s ambitions are different. He is not writing an epic tale, like the “Odyssey,” which Ananda “hadn’t even bothered to read.” Neither is he creating a breakthrough work like Joyce.

This novel’s lightness and satire is evoked through references to these works. Ananda had “tried his hand at ‘Ulysses’ when he was eighteen, and reached its finale without comprehending it.” And as for Homer, “he fantasized he was partaking of the food Homer had written of – then rejected the fantasy.”

We live in a time of great migration, and much of literature deals with the displacement people feel who move into a different culture.

Chaudhuri, who was born in Calcutta in 1962, grew up in Bombay and went to university in England, where he now lives. Like the author, Ananda is of Bengali-Sylheti ancestry. He feels himself a stranger in England, even though his parents married in London in 1955. “He was Indian. He’d go back home someday – the deferred promise defined him.”

Yet he is also English and considers himself above the “Asians” who populate London.

Not much happens on the day the novel takes place, except in Ananda’s thoughts. “It was thought, self-consciousness, and concentration he hated, because they brought him back to himself.” The silence in his flat when he closed the window “emphasized the leaden permanence of … the proximity of this shadowy, indestructible thing, the self.”

Halfway through the novel, this self-consciousness taxes our attention. But to the rescue comes another character, Ananda’s uncle Radhesh, his mother’s brother. He is a comic character who has lived in London for nearly 30 years and loves to spout philosophy. Supposedly a genius, he worked in business in London but has now been laid off.

Radhesh drinks his morning coffee with 11 teaspoons of sugar, wears an old three-piece suit over his pajamas to keep warm and talks often about his bowel movements, distinguishing a “big job” from a “small job.”

The two of them make a jaunt across London and visit a Bengali restaurant, where they enjoy a meal before returning to Ananda’s apartment, not Ithaca, though that is the ironic title of the final section of the book.

“Odysseus Abroad” gives us an outsider’s view of life in London in 1985 but also entices us to look at our own surroundings with new sight. It asks us to think about our mundane life and where our own odyssey may take us.

It is not, however, a book for those who want their fiction to entertain or involve much plot.

This story was originally published September 11, 2015 at 2:31 PM with the headline "The lonely odyssey on the streets of 1985 London."