The book is a novel. I'm pretty sure of that. What marks out a novel is this: the author and the narrator are not one. Even if, by coincidence, they share the same name. The narrator's views, thoughts, observations—essentially, the narrator's life—are his or her own. The narrator might be created by the author, but is a mystery to him. The provenance of his or her remarks and actions is never plain."By coincidence." Okay. It may be that the narrator of this book, Amit Chaudhuri, is not the autho...

Christ what a slog.

A man by the name of Amit Chaudhuri who is not the author but also kind of is, strolls around the city of Bombay. He’s there to promote his new novel. It’s where he grew up, it’s the city that feels most like home, but it’s the city he didn’t want to live in and left when he could – though that doesn’t stop him from returning again and again. I loved this quiet, intelligent, introspective novel that felt less like a story and more like a series of meditations on a place and culture; on memory, t...

DNF at p. 123

A quietly thoughtful book about a writer's relationship with the city he grew up in, framed around his on and off connection to a childhood friend whose life has been troubled and stalled. Memory, the fitful passage of time, and shifting perspectives on one's own past are explored. And as a story which closely echoes the author's own life and work, there is also the question of how life informs fiction, or thinly veiled autobiography—that is, where author ends and protagonist begins.The placemen...

The writing is by no means underwhelming! The book is in fact mesmerizing (in its own niche way), and well written.The novel, if at all a fiction in its entirety, is full of nostalgia and works as a fine travelogue for Mumbai/Bombay. A desirable throwback, one could say.But so far as the story is concerned, i was personally expecting something TOTALLY different! Just not for me.

"The genre of "autobiography," the author-protagonist of Chaudhuri's novel Friend of My Youth explains to a journalist during an interview,"presumes you first live your life and then pour it into a piece of writing" Chaudhuri attempts to avoid this by creating a narrative that is experienced in the present, as a series of trips to Bombay, where the Amit of the novel grew up, and which he had willingly left. Amit does indeed have memories of the city, but does not really feel a part of it. He als...

Originally posted on my blog.A Meditation on Many Things: Amit Chaudhuri's Friend of My YouthIn Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines, the narrator confuses the sense in which we use the terms ‘coming’ and ‘going’. Amit Chaudhuri’s Friend of My Youth, like Ghosh’s novel, also plays with these terms while questioning, contradicting, and shifting our understanding of another term: ‘home’. Friend of My Youth is a meditation on many things: the city of Bombay, life, death, language, friendship, and the no...

I don't quite understand what the book was. IT was neither a travelogue nor a biography. Nothing actually happens in the book. One can say, it's a play of emotional description. I would not deny that the author wrote a picture of sentiments, yet I did not feel the connection. A flow was missing in the writing and I found there was no purpose in writing the whole book instead it could be a series of newspaper columns or be moulded into a travelogue.

Really enjoyed this. Short and sweet work of autofiction. Made me think a lot about my hometown of Cali, and how weird it feels to return to a place where you never really belonged."No one is sure any more what the novel is. The word has unprecedented currency. People are thrown it intermittently, and sometimes they throw it back. For about a decade now, when I've hedged and said, in answer to some query about my profession, 'I write novels,' people have occasionally countered with, 'Fiction or

Chaudhuri's experiments with novel writing craft reaps great success here. If you live (or have lived) in Bombay, pick this up without a thought.

A writer settled in US, comes back to his hometown in Mumbai for a book reading session.He recounts his memories of the city and people associated with the places.His childhood friend named 'Ramu' accompanies him and gives him company in all his tours.This book is a light memoir of the author's day to day experience. Like roaming around Gateway, Malabar Hill, Flora Fountain, Marine Drive, Bandra, Elphinstone, Nariman point, Colaba, Mahim, Hanging Gardens, Radio Club, Kamla Nehru Park etc etc. An...

This is an understated account of the way place and person become intertwined so that one can hardly enjoy the one without the other. The narrator / author, for it seems they are perhaps the same, returns to Bombay, where he had lived an extended period before. He has come for a reading from his latest novel, which gives him at moments a feeling of significance and at other moments a sense of ridiculousness. His memories of Bombay are closely connected with a friend named Ramu, who has long been...

This is a clever auto-fiction set in Bombay, a place of frequent returns and rediscoveries. It is also the story of childhood friendship, one taken for granted and missed only when it is no longer there. It is perhaps in the shared experience of many a migrant and overwhelmed me with nostalgia.

This is a reflective journey into childhood tinged with the sadness that things change whether you like it or not. When you no longer live in the place of your childhood there is a strange feeling that overcomes you to spot the similarities and differences when you return. Chaudhuri has captured this dislocation beautifully. I like his description of looking up into the sky to see where we might go and down to the ground to see where we have been.

I picked up this book during my brief visit back to Hyderabad, having flown in after a year. I happened to read just one paragraph before purchasing the book, never having previously heard of Amit Chaudhuri. It was enough to convince me that the writer knew exactly how it is to return to a place you wanted to leave so desperately and yet feel an odd longing to return to. His poetic prose was a joy to read. Though Bombay is a city that is alien to me, I enjoyed the personal descriptions of each p...

It's not a happy ending; it's a convention created for the purposes of an impossible sense of uplift at the end of death and tragedy: the happy beginning. Technology makes Hades unnecessary.2.5 stars. Elegiac and svelte but emotionally cold, this spare novel looks at the Jihadi attack on the Taj Hotel in 2008 and by extension upon a variation of the life of an author. A junkie best friend becomes a sounding board. This reader was left largely indifferent.

Chaudhuri is a master of transforming nostalgia into narrative, which, in this short novel, revolves around a friend of his youth, Ramu. His recollections of meetings with Ramu, who we learn in the beginning is quarantined in an Alibaug rehab, are interspersed with childhood memories and experiences growing up in the enclaves of South Bombay and, for a brief period, Bandra. Much of the book is narrated as vignettes that leap back and forth in spacetime, where we find the narrator (who we're told...

Nicely written, and perhaps would have more of an impact if I had any knowledge of Mumbai. But really, this is very slight, tediously meta (DID YOU KNOW YOU WERE READING A BOOK???), and not particularly insightful. I hope Chaudhuri enjoyed writing it, though. It seems like something that the author enjoys more than the audience.

Friend of my Youth by Amit Chaudhuri is an elegantly written concise memoir. It perhaps falls into the category of creative non-fiction. The book has been received with much acclaim. I’d say, for a slim book, Friend of my Youth is certainly punching beyond its size. Amit Chaudhuri juxtaposes his impressions and experiences from a recent visit to Bombay with recollections of early life in the city. This device works for most part relatively seamlessly. It may have, however, risked becoming tediou...