Review by New York Times Review
It takes some gumption to name your novel after an Alice Munro story, particularly one you haven't read. As Chaudhuri admits in "Friend of My Youth," Munro's title was so good he couldn't imagine compromising it by reading the story itself. And so Chaudhuri gave Munro's title a story of his own. His "Friend of My Youth" begins with its narrator fresh from the plane, ferried by a taxi driver who can't imagine that his passenger, a fairly successful novelist modeled on Chaudhuri himself, was raised in Bombay. Geographies have shifted; the place Chaudhuri knew as Bombay is now South Bombay, an outpost for old wealth and old servants. His taxi passes stalls where girls sell traditional white bracelets alongside pirated Jhumpa Lahiri novels. The friend of the title is Ramu, a fellow veteran of a school "meant for rich children." Chaudhuri went on to Oxford; Ramu went to rehab for an addiction to "brown sugar" heroin. Chaudhuri thinks of Ramu as "fugitive in a way that was attractive," too restless to hold onto a real job. Chaudhuri's other evasive friend is Bombay. Haunted by the 2008 terrorist attacks at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, Chaudhuri imagines running the event in reverse, watching fragments "regain their old places until completion is achieved, and, at last, there's no discontinuity between past and present." The novel is intermittently satisfying, at times arresting. At its best, it feels as vigorously empty as a Japanese watercolor, at its worst like a demoralized Lonely Planet guide: There's the bar Chaudhuri visited with his wife in 1993 and the new security measures at the Taj, flowers whose names he doesn't know in the Hanging Gardens, where "optimistic foliage sculptures abound." I left wanting to know a little less about the sprightliness of Bombay's horticulture and a little more about Chaudhuri and Ramu. "I know that recognizability is an illusion," Chaudhuri tells us. Personalities shift, white kurtas turn into suits, architectures change, and yet Ramu is Ramu, Bombay is Bombay (unless it's Mumbai). Chaudhuri has been called Proustian, but he is less interested in recalling a past era than in evoking its absence. There are traces all over the novel, nudges and snatches and hints, but they only add up to a ghost. JAMIE FISHER has recently completed a novel set in postwar Italy.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 11, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
In Chaudhuri's (Odysseus Abroad , 2015) eighth novel an example of what the French call autofiction, even as he critiques or subverts the expectations of this subgenre the narrator/author makes three visits to the city where he grew up and rendezvouses with his friend Ramu, though the friend is also the no-longer-existing city of Bombay, which has been renamed Mumbai. Principal events, Ramu's years-long heroin addiction and the days-long terrorist attack on the landmark Taj hotel, take place before the book begins. Wandering in the neighborhoods he frequented as a child and staying at the Taj hotel, Chaudhuri, in elliptical prose, describes experiences both poignant and ambivalent. His friend has aged but not necessarily grown up; the hotel has been rebuilt but not necessarily restored. The paltry new security features can only intrude on the narrator's memories: I'm undecided about the time we live in. The ongoing passage to oblivion. To paraphrase a title of Proust's, a writer Chaudhuri has been compared to often, this is a remarkable record of pasts recaptured that had never been free in the first place.--Michael Autrey Copyright 2019 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This striking novel from Chaudhuri (A Strange and Sublime Address) tracks a writer by the same name returning to his boyhood home of Bombay for a book reading. This time, the place feels different-it's after the 2008 terror attack, and his childhood friend Ramu is back in rehab. Amit doesn't have anywhere to be aside from his reading and running an errand for his family. As he wanders the streets, Amit reflects on why he left Bombay. He scans bookshelves for his work and doesn't see his titles, forcing him to reconsider his mark on the city. He also thinks about the sacrifices his parents made for his education; his mother had to sell her jewelry after the family fell on hard times. Amit speaks with a working man who recalls his parents from years ago, making him realize though Amit's parents no longer live in Bombay, they still belong. Without the anchor of seeing Ramu, Amit discovers how tenuous his connection to the past becomes. In this cogent and introspective novel, Chaudhuri movingly portrays how other people can allow individuals to connect their present and past. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
In this elusive, evocative fiction, a novelist's visit to his boyhood hometown of Bombay calls up memories of a longtime friend and a recent terrorist episode.Returning to "the city of my growing up," the narrator learns that Ramu, an old schooldays friend he counted on seeing and regards as "what survives of the familiar" in Bombay, is in rehab. So he carries on with the main business of his visit, which is a reading from his latest novel. The narrator, who bears the author's name, concedes that "my writing is accused of coming directly from life." Later he'll say he is working on a book called Friend of My Youth that he's "pretty sure" is a novel. Novelists used to be coy about what was autobiographical in their fiction, and now what looks like autobiography is called autofiction. Chaudhuri's (Odysseus Abroad, 2015, etc.) seventh novel doesn't submit to one label, offering instead a medley of genres, from journal to travelogue to essay and memoir but little in the way of straightforward fiction. The narrator navigates streets and sites and the memories they kindle, many of which concern Ramu, a longtime heroin user. The writer gives an interview, visits a bookstore. The story is awash in mundane details, but the narrator is always sifting through them for resonance as he also sifts through different pasts. So he runs an errand for his wife and mother at an upscale shoe shop in the Taj Mahal Hotel, one of the targets of the terrorist attacks on the sea-swept city in 2008, when "men with AK-47s alighted from dinghies." The narrator ponders the work of repairing the raids' damage, connects it to Paul Klee's Angelus Novus and a passage from Walter Benjamin on the painting that flows smoothly back into terrorism and the Taj. The gray matter's colorful play recalls Virginia Woolf's disingenuous disclaimer early in A Room of One's Own: "I give you my thoughts as they came to me."Anything but a conventional novel, its pleasures arise from a craftsman's writing and its subtle demands and rewards. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
