Book Review: Friend of my Youth

Kavalier Karamazov
Jul 30, 2017 · 6 min read

Amit Chaudhuri is back. With a novel. Friend of my Youth.

It’s a slim hardback in generously spaced text. Its front cover has a plastic sticker with the book’s title and a scenic sunset backdrop on it. The title and the author’s name appear on its spine, which is coffee-brown along half its length. The plain, wheat-coloured cover design makes the book look older than it is and easy to overlook on the bookshelves. The edges are sharp. The pages are rather thin and yellowish; a few brown flyleaves precede and append the print. “Penguin” is pressed on the bottom on the back cover; “Fiction” beside the orange-haloed publisher logo. Superlatives by Amartya Sen and Salman Rushdie, commending Chaudhuri’s work– that also, strangely, appear on his other books — are printed on the back cover. So is the ISBN, and the price — “499”.

I turn the book this way and that, eager to describe to death its physical attributes. But then, I am no Amit Chaudhuri, whose prowess and pride lie in painting exhaustive details using flawless sentences. Be it stairs or buildings, croissants or bombil, shoes and socks — all thing’s well-known and wanton.

His latest is about Bombay and his friend Ramu. At least that’s what its narrator, also named Amit, also a writer, who’s on a book tour to Bombay, wants us to believe. But, frankly, neither his drug-addict friend nor the maximum city is the subject of Amit’s sincere attention. Page after page, following him on his visits to his favourite restaurants at the Taj, to various shoeshops and bookstores, to places that serve fish and prawn, to waterfront and whatnot, I realised that this book was about Amit, and Amit alone — and everything else that gets mentioned in these pages is purely coincidental.

This is an alarmingly self-absorbed book by a deeply self-obsessed writer, a writer who’s eager to capture the minutiae on paper but unaware of the extent to which his own cocky self gets in the way. A writer devoid of the power to engage or care, unwilling to see beyond the meagre world of his banal boyhood. The world he describes is south Bombay. Its hangouts, its buildings and its lanes, the Taj and its surroundings. But without a hint of nuance or flair in any of his accounts, restricted and blinkered, looking more to satiate his senses than serve us a slice of the city he’s in, nothing of note emerges out of his many perambulations; without anything to add to the Bombay we already know the book emerges generic and inane. The only friend he has in Bombay is a jobless junkie. Amit treats him like a lousy sidekick, tugging him along when alone in the city only to snub when he has his family with him. It’s impossible to not feel bad for the poor guy. Amit has nothing noteworthy to say about the city, its history or architecture, its people. I lost all hope when Amit, at one instance, is unsure if his room has a wooden flooring or a linoleum spread. It’s Amit’s whims, his fancies, his wants, his dislikes, and his sense of superiority we read about, over and over again. And it’s deathly boring.

Never the one to give plot a chance or space in his books, Chaudhuri at his best brought cities (as in his best book, Calcutta: Two Years) and delicate everyday moments to life merely on the strength of his style and observations that stuck to the mental eye. His debut, A Strange and Sublime Address, a novella broken into many short chapters, captured the mundane life of a Calcutta family in meticulous detail. Narrated from the point of view of a little boy, it was storyless and themeless — a Amit Chaudhuri hallmark the world has come to appraise as art — but was effusive and enchanting, if only by clinging to the gluey syrup of induced nostalgia. There, he lurked under the sentences, putting himself at the centre to take us places; here, he is full of himself, always spilling over like an overfull pot of ice cream, melting lazily all over the place into a sticky mess. There, the detailing accrued to give the scenes a semblance of depth; here, it is all superficial.

In a rare moment of respite, and a welcome departure from his description of food at the members-only club he’s staying at, a journalist interviews Amit for his upcoming book, The Immortals. Erudition has ways of creeping into our mindless patter, and Amit is no different, as he paraphrases some of Frank O’ Connor’s ideas on the novel. It’s a quotable passage — and the only one that’s not about Amit and his tacky self: “I am thinking of Frank O’ Connor who said that the poem or short story is about the… moment, and the novel — I think he had the nineteenth-century novel in mind — about the passage of time.”

If this book was some audacious attempt to bend the form, Amit has more than succeeded, in that he’s twisted his work beyond repair.

One of the chapters opens with this sentence: “I love Parsi food.” Another: “I’m hungry.” And another: “Cities are finite.” They lead us nowhere, neither inform nor illuminate, nor do they sustain on a common thought. The 26/11 terrorist attack is cursorily mentioned as though all it led to was the destruction of his favourite sea-facing nook at the Taj. And everything else comes off equally self-important and loosely done.

Chaudhuri does a gig to go meta as we near the end: The narrator Amit alludes to a novel he’s working on about Bombay named Friend of my Youth. He assures us that it’s a novel: “ The book is a novel. I’m pretty sure of that.” He goes on about explaining his novel, in fact this novel: “What marks out a novel is this: the author and narrator are not one. Even if by coincidence they share the same name.” If this is a disavowal, then as a reader it’s impossible to buy — certainly not when it’s exhorted in so many words. (If you, sir, happen to read this piece, let me assure you that the Amit I accuse of blatant, unashamed narcissism is, after all, Amit the narrator. Not you, sir, no.)

His smugness knows no end when he remarks, “It’s a well-known fact in India that no novel is taken seriously until a good deal of research has gone into it…. Going down the stairs will be research. So will looking out at the sea.” I wonder if Suketu Mehta or Vikram Seth would’ve produced their masterworks by merely descending the stairs of their hotel room and daydreamed by the sea.

The first person pronouns are an eyesore. Amit relentlessly dancing around superficial details to the tune of his sonorous sentences gets the ear drums ringing. The repeated descriptions of food leave a bad taste in the mouth of even the most enthusiastic gourmand. Amit is honest in admitting his lack of love for Bombay; his lack of love for Ramu; his cheap tricks to procure a discount during his stay at the Taj; his dislike for smartphones; his hatred for his school.

But do we care? Is there anything at stake? Does the indulgence give way to ruminations? What’s in it for us, the readers?

Amit is graceful to acknowledge the work whose name he’s lifted for the title of his “novel” — that of a short story by Alice Munro. (A far better work, needless to say.) But he’s quick to cut back to his silly snobby self when he admits having not read the Munro story after the first paragraph. He’s quick to clarify the why, but by now we don’t really care.

The best thing about Friend of my Youth is that it ends quickly. The thing that made me sweat is the thought of how this could have gone on and on, because Amit could surely visit Bombay again — correction: south Bombay — go around the neighbourhood familiar to him and call it research, describe the mundane and dare us to appreciate the timelessness of his artistic endeavour. Nightmare! But no, he’s not a tyrant; he relents. What’s disappointing, though, is a great writer I once loved producing such junk.

So what should have been a blogpost at most, ends up in print, hardcover and all.

Kavalier Karamazov

Written by

Books: I smell, covet and read: Will write one some day.

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