2 stars for being utterly forgettable but attractively packaged. -Sarah

Maybe it wasn't weird I picked up the Odyssey at the same time as this after all. Anywho to this book, not for me or read it at the wrong time. But leaning more that it wasn't for me.

An interesting account of nephew and uncle immigrants frim India to England. Speaks of the immigrant condition. Lots of poetry reference. Inyeresting.

I really enjoyed the language of this book, and could appreciate echoes of both Homer & Joyce in the writing & structure, but ultimately I could find little in the characters, either the nephew or his uncle, which actually interested me. Ananda's mother, by contrast, seemed much more enticing. A book to be read for what it is attempting to do, rather than for enjoyment.

I can see why this book would not be for some people. I love narratives with lovely language and thoughtful rumination, even without a powerful plot. As a woman with a nephew just Ananda's age, I did find the nephew-uncle dynamic very interesting. Although the novel explicitly evokes Joyce's Ulysses And Homer's Odyssey, both of which I have read, I was more reminded of woolf's "mrs Dalloway" in terms of the book's style snd premise. (And length).

Set in a day, borrowing and expanding upon the Odyssey and Ulysseus, full of sharp writing and painterly metaphors about race, politics, literature, class and young ambition, I'm glad this essay brought this novel to my attention. I'm glad I made time for it. And I'm glad more books like this will some day exist in this world.

The dust jacket really wants readers to have James Joyce in mind. I confess, I haven’t actually read Joyce yet, so the success or indeed even the accuracy of such a comparison is somewhat lost on me. I can recognize that Odysseus Abroad seeks to accomplish a specific kind of literature. There may be readers dazzled by the results. Indeed, there may be those who hail it as a classic. I’m inclined to more tempered thoughts. I see that it deliberately presents a “stranger in a strange land” narrati...

Actual rating: 2.5 stars

A humorous take on a 1980s immigrant story. Chaudhuri has a great memory of Thatcherite London, and his description of a city on the threshold of a gentrification revolution is evocative of a time wherein which we all could perhaps think about affording a small let flat in London. Ananda's uncle is a great portrait of the last full generation of middle class workers who were able to retire comfortably on a pension that was never in doubt of going away, and his frivolity with his cash is both end...

Symbiosis: "Permanent union between organisms each of which depends for its existence on the other as the fungus and alga composing lichen." - Concise Oxford Dictionary. By the end of this book you're not sure which of these two expatriate characters, the uncle or the nephew, is the fungus and which the alga. In the beginning it seems that the nephew is more healthy but by the end...They are both gifted poetic types whose gifts have turned inward. This might have happened anywhere but the proces...

A day in the life of an aspiring Indian poet and his uncle and their life in London. Their comical dialogue and interactions and ruminations on life, aspirations, and the immigrant experience make the book. There is no particular "plot" to speak of, just the unfolding of the day and the opportunities it provides to illuminate the experience of being "other" for the reader.

"With his quiet ruminative voice and powerfully crafted sentences, Chaudhuri has carved himself a specific kind of niche, where high art can be found even in one long Sunday afternoon walk, in such everyday “small existential dramas." - Poornima Apte, BookBrowse.com. Full review at: https://www.bookbrowse.com/reviews/in...

I adored it from start to finish. I loved that it was plotless, I loved the musings on identity and literature, especially as it pertains to colonialism. The subtleties of seeking home away from home and not quite finding it, the mannerisms of locals that are initially imperceptible but speak to a tangible void between experiences. The genre of international student fiction needs more works like this. I would read an entire anthology of Ananda's thoughts as he traverses London. I really want to

Joyce set out to neuter the epic-ness of Homer's grand story, to show that the mundane lives of people may mimic that story. And he developed a new way to describe mundanity; his syntatical innovations changed literature for ever. Chaudhuri, one would assume, shares the first ambition, for he too labours to show how a day in the lives of two Indians living in London - uncle and nephew - may mimic Homer. There is an added complexity here, of course, for his conversation with Joyce is definitely g...

2.5 stars

A well-written meditation on cultureThis short book gives all the pleasures of a well-written memoir. Yes, I know it is labeled a novel, and if I were to look up the biography of the Indian-born author, now a professor at the University of East Anglia, I would find many differences between his life and that of his protagonist Ananda Sen. But in writing of a budding poet who comes to London University to study English Literature in the Thatcher era, he is clearly drawing on his own experience: sa...

Ananda is adrift in London, where he is a kind of non-heroic Odysseus--or maybe a Telemachus--making decidedly short journeys with his uncle in a world almost as strange, at least to him, as the world through which Homer's Odyssey takes us. His journeys only lead back to his bedsit, where he strives to write poetry and wonders whether one must have the experience of love to write of love. Meanwhile, his real home is very far off--eastern Bangladesh. His current world belongs to the odd English,

Almost an epic journey through the streets of London. Perfect adjectives to evoke an exact feeling of a particular moment. I think I can read this book a hundred times to re-experience those moments: wondering how sounds can come through a thin slit, how noises made by the neighbors above can show the mentality of an entire generation. Tiny details. Of huge significance. The mundane can be as exciting as Ulysses' epic homecoming. I was marking each chapter with notations to match the original Od...

A day in the life of a would-be Bengali poet matriculating at a London university faintly mimics Joyce's work faintly mimicking Homer's. Biases on the table I tend tI find critiques of of the west from non-western writers entertaining but even still I thought this was quite strong. Apart from a fascinating depiction of Thatcher's London (and the Indian sub-community in particular) it truly does resemble Joyce in its earthy humanism and the essential sympathy it has for its characters.

Odysseus Abroad by Amit Chaudhuri Set in the mid 1980s, London, Ananda is a student who has little interest in his studies. Instead, he practices at being a poet. He and his Bengali uncle are occasionally visited by their relatives. In fact, Ananda’s mother recently left and her leaving has spiked his ever-present home sickness. This is the story of a day in Ananda’s life in which he spends it with his uncle Radhesh on their weekly rumble through London.Ananda is a bit of a hopeless romantic whe...