Sojourn

September 1, 2022
Chaudhuri's eighth novel dispenses with novelistic trappings; the nameless first-person narrator is less a character than a sensibility. But the setting is consistent with Chaudhuri's earlier fiction. This figure is displaced, without family, a visiting professor in Berlin, squired around by a Bangladeshi exile. Faqrul is not unlike the eccentric, scatological uncle at the center of Odysseus Abroad (2015). The narrator has a grave sense of potty humor, too; every day he puts his "bum" on the same toilet seat used by Kenziburo Oe, the Nobel laureate who previously lived in this university-managed apartment. Like figures in the novels of Patrick Modiano, this nameless professor is porous. "Rather than an observer, I tend to enter the lives of the things I see," he confesses. The history of Berlin and the absence of the Wall are as familiar as his own story. His memories drift away, or does he desert them? This book is whittled yet dense, like an axe head without a handle. It might leave one uneasy, which is the point. The present, ever-present, can feel devouringly eternal.

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Starred review from August 15, 2022
A professor's Berlin sojourn finds him meandering through its streets and storied past. As in his two most recent novels, Chaudhuri places his main character in a city and lets him wander physically and mentally. The narrator is a 43-year-old academic on a four-month stint as a visiting professor at an unnamed Berlin university. In his flat, once occupied by Kenzaburo Oe, he's bemused by the German toilet's landing platform and realizes that the Nobelist once sat on the same throne. This is typical of Chaudhuri, the intersections of present and past and an understated humor, even when there's a butt in the joke. The narrator meets a Bangladeshi poet who shows him around Berlin and then disappears for a while, to be replaced by a woman who brings him to a venue where people have been coming for decades to dance to older songs. Also constantly present with punctuating artifacts is the city's sense of history: the site of the Berlin Wall; the World War II "rotten tooth" relic of a church's bombed tower; a spot from which Jews were sent to the camps. These are "spaces in which you sense time, but also inhabit the viewpoint of those who've already been there"--leading to perspectives that are "intense but momentary." Many points in this drifting chronicle are briefly intense, a product of the narrator's close observation and glinting insights. A mere 140 pages, with some holding just one or two paragraphs, the book is only physically slight. It grips the mind, as much with appreciation as with frustration, and teases one into parsing what is real or autofiction, what is changeless or transient. A reader may even enjoy feeling a bit at sea, like the narrator: "I've lost my bearings--not in the city; in its history." A masterful writer in his own subtle, thoughtful, demanding genre.

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