Sojourn by Amit Chaudhuri review – adrift in Berlin | Fiction

Amit Chaudhuri’s eighth novel reminded me of 1993’s Afternoon Raag, featuring an alienated English literature student at Oxford, or 2014’s Odysseus Abroad, about Ananda, a poet adrift in London. Sojourn has the same impressionistic tone – everything feels dreamlike, illusory and yet attentively described. There’s a similar meandering and languid style that likes to survey minor day-to-day details, mingling and suffusing them with the wider significances of history. This time we are in Berlin, though, and our unnamed protagonist is no longer a student but a visiting professor at the university.

Sojourn is an even slimmer book than those earlier works – more compact and stripped down, as if seeking to do more with less. Chaudhuri is now 60. He was born in Calcutta (now Kolkata), grew up in Bombay (Mumbai), and studied in London and Oxford. I should say upfront that you don’t read his work for plot or purposefulness. He eschews conflict or confected drama; his literary preoccupation is best characterised as “belonging and not belonging”. And in this book – as in those others – he meditates on identity; identity as conjured or dispelled in a setting.

Some things do happen. Our narrator makes friends – among them Faqrul and Birgit, and Peter from Toronto. They wander around Berlin and share several meals. (Food is something Chaudhuri loves to get on the page – his narrator can “spot wagonloads of bratwurst” from a distance.) There’s a vaguely intimate relationship. There’s a scene with the narrator’s cleaner. There are some interesting travels on the U3, for those who know the city’s U-Bahn. But the storyline, such as it is, is really a kind of accumulating diffusion. “I keep walking – in which direction I’m not sure,” Chaudhuri’s narrator explains. “I’ve lost my bearings – not in the city; in its history.” Peter from Toronto, meanwhile, “appeared quite contented – as you might when you begin to understand your place in the world”.

Berlin is appearing a lot in fiction at the moment. Hari Kunzru, Helon Habila and Chris Power are among those to have set novels in the city over the last couple of years, but these writers evoke and engage the German capital in more kinetic, tangible and realised ways. Chaudhuri’s narrator, by contrast, experiences Berlin as something that cannot quite be apprehended. “The Brandenburg Gate came up. Lit, resplendent, a sovereign without purpose.” Elsewhere, he gets off at the wrong station on the U-Bahn and is “surprised” by “the calm absence I find myself in. Is the absence Rüdesheimer Platz?” In the scene with the cleaner, the narrator asks if she has plans for the weekend; but she doesn’t understand English. She replies “with a radiant look” in German (that he doesn’t understand either) that his towels are dirty and the washing powder running out but that she will buy some more.

The reading pleasure comes more in the observational turns of phrase. I loved the narrator’s description of Faqrul’s “pre-emptive air”, or the way he and Birgit climb the stairs with “the urgency of childhood friends”. Faqrul examines a pair of shoes: “‘They’re good,’ he said, narrowing his eyes like he was assessing weaponry.” The novel is peppered with such moments; you have to change your reading mode from “what happens and why are humans like this?” to a more zen-like “life is unknowable and yet still we breathe and eat and sleep”.

Chaudhuri in this novel is not quite the master of Proust-like prose that he was in earlier work. Near the beginning of the book Faqrul phones, trying to prise the narrator out to interview him, and Chaudhuri describes him as a man who “had the bridegroom’s thick skin”, not an attribute associated with grooms on their big day. A dozen or so pages later, Faqrul “brandishes” the narrator at the vendors selling souvenirs of the Berlin Wall, who “receive [him] with shy approval; the way bridegrooms are”. Later, Faqrul is described as “indirect, like a bridegroom with his bride”. For a writer of this level of sensitivity to use such an image three times in so short a novel – and, frankly, to mangle it – speaks of a lack of attention.

This sounds a little as though I didn’t enjoy the book. I did. By the end, I had grown fond of the muted tone and the disconcerting uneventfulness. All the same, I can’t help but feel that the reader is seldom uppermost in Chaudhuri’s mind. There’s a moment when the narrator comes down the stairs and says: “I’d forgotten what Faqrul looked like, but he smiled at me and I smiled back distantly.” I underlined the sentence and scribbled “the exact relationship between Chaudhuri and the reader”.

Amit Chaudhuri’s eighth novel reminded me of 1993’s Afternoon Raag, featuring an alienated English literature student at Oxford, or 2014’s Odysseus Abroad, about Ananda, a poet adrift in London. Sojourn has the same impressionistic tone – everything feels dreamlike, illusory and yet attentively described. There’s a similar meandering and languid style that likes to survey minor day-to-day details, mingling and suffusing them with the wider significances of history. This time we are in Berlin, though, and our unnamed protagonist is no longer a student but a visiting professor at the university.

Sojourn is an even slimmer book than those earlier works – more compact and stripped down, as if seeking to do more with less. Chaudhuri is now 60. He was born in Calcutta (now Kolkata), grew up in Bombay (Mumbai), and studied in London and Oxford. I should say upfront that you don’t read his work for plot or purposefulness. He eschews conflict or confected drama; his literary preoccupation is best characterised as “belonging and not belonging”. And in this book – as in those others – he meditates on identity; identity as conjured or dispelled in a setting.

Some things do happen. Our narrator makes friends – among them Faqrul and Birgit, and Peter from Toronto. They wander around Berlin and share several meals. (Food is something Chaudhuri loves to get on the page – his narrator can “spot wagonloads of bratwurst” from a distance.) There’s a vaguely intimate relationship. There’s a scene with the narrator’s cleaner. There are some interesting travels on the U3, for those who know the city’s U-Bahn. But the storyline, such as it is, is really a kind of accumulating diffusion. “I keep walking – in which direction I’m not sure,” Chaudhuri’s narrator explains. “I’ve lost my bearings – not in the city; in its history.” Peter from Toronto, meanwhile, “appeared quite contented – as you might when you begin to understand your place in the world”.

Berlin is appearing a lot in fiction at the moment. Hari Kunzru, Helon Habila and Chris Power are among those to have set novels in the city over the last couple of years, but these writers evoke and engage the German capital in more kinetic, tangible and realised ways. Chaudhuri’s narrator, by contrast, experiences Berlin as something that cannot quite be apprehended. “The Brandenburg Gate came up. Lit, resplendent, a sovereign without purpose.” Elsewhere, he gets off at the wrong station on the U-Bahn and is “surprised” by “the calm absence I find myself in. Is the absence Rüdesheimer Platz?” In the scene with the cleaner, the narrator asks if she has plans for the weekend; but she doesn’t understand English. She replies “with a radiant look” in German (that he doesn’t understand either) that his towels are dirty and the washing powder running out but that she will buy some more.

The reading pleasure comes more in the observational turns of phrase. I loved the narrator’s description of Faqrul’s “pre-emptive air”, or the way he and Birgit climb the stairs with “the urgency of childhood friends”. Faqrul examines a pair of shoes: “‘They’re good,’ he said, narrowing his eyes like he was assessing weaponry.” The novel is peppered with such moments; you have to change your reading mode from “what happens and why are humans like this?” to a more zen-like “life is unknowable and yet still we breathe and eat and sleep”.

Chaudhuri in this novel is not quite the master of Proust-like prose that he was in earlier work. Near the beginning of the book Faqrul phones, trying to prise the narrator out to interview him, and Chaudhuri describes him as a man who “had the bridegroom’s thick skin”, not an attribute associated with grooms on their big day. A dozen or so pages later, Faqrul “brandishes” the narrator at the vendors selling souvenirs of the Berlin Wall, who “receive [him] with shy approval; the way bridegrooms are”. Later, Faqrul is described as “indirect, like a bridegroom with his bride”. For a writer of this level of sensitivity to use such an image three times in so short a novel – and, frankly, to mangle it – speaks of a lack of attention.

This sounds a little as though I didn’t enjoy the book. I did. By the end, I had grown fond of the muted tone and the disconcerting uneventfulness. All the same, I can’t help but feel that the reader is seldom uppermost in Chaudhuri’s mind. There’s a moment when the narrator comes down the stairs and says: “I’d forgotten what Faqrul looked like, but he smiled at me and I smiled back distantly.” I underlined the sentence and scribbled “the exact relationship between Chaudhuri and the reader”.