Feelings of dislocation are at the heart of Amit Chaudhuri’s award-winning novels. Friend of My Youth (2017) followed a writer’s unsettling trip back to his childhood home in Bombay. Before that, Odysseus Abroad (2014) charted the day of a lonely English literature student from India as he meandered around London. Now, in Sojourn – Chaudhuri’s eighth novel – we meet a nameless first-person narrator adrift in Berlin.
It is the early 2000s, and the 43-year-old, Indian protagonist has just arrived as a visiting professor at a university for four months. He doesn’t know anyone, and navigating the streets is confusing. After giving his inaugural talk, he is accosted by Faqrul, a ‘furtive’, ‘entertaining’ poet kicked out of Bangladesh for insulting the Prophet Mohammed. Faqrul phones him the next day, and almost every day after that. He acts as a kind of tour guide, taking the narrator to Peek & Cloppenburg to buy new clothes, pointing out sex shops and bullet holes on the sides of buildings. But the more the narrator sees, the more he becomes untethered from reality.
Chaudhuri is masterful at showing the effect Berlin has on the narrator. The city is ‘part graveyard, part playground’, filled with dark memories ‘reported to you. They sink in’. His neighbourhood borders the ‘frozen beauty’ of Grunewald forest, from where ‘“they sent Jews to the camps,” [Faqrul] said, lighting a cigarette’. He is drawn to things that transcend nationality: German words that sound ‘exactly like Bengali’, and an Indian song playing on the radio by a fruit vendor in the U-Bahn station. It’s all the more poignant, then, that the narrator experiences several moments of racism. ‘They think you live in a hut, where you come from,’ an acquaintance tells him.
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