Friend of My Youth

by Amit Chaudhuri

Overview

An intensely personal novel about childhood, memory, and history by one of today's most celebrated authors, now available in the US for the first time.

Friend of My Youth begins with the novelist Amit Chaudhuri returning to Bombay, the city in which he grew up, to give a reading. Ramu, the friend of his youth, with whom he likes to get together when he comes back, is not there: after years of disabling drug addiction, Ramu has signed up for an intensive rehab program. But Amit Chaudhuri has errands to run in Bombay for his mother and wife, which take him back to the Taj Mahal Hotel, the site, not that long before, of a brutal terrorist attack.


Amit Chaudhuri writes novels the way an extraordinary instrumentalist makes music, stating and restating his themes, trying them out in different keys and to various effect, developing and dropping them, only to pick them up again and turn them completely around. He engages both our minds and our hearts. He makes us marvel. Friend of My Youth, his deceptively casual and continually observant and inventive new novel, makes us see and feel the great city of Bombay while bringing us into the quizzical, tender, rueful, and reflective sensibility of its central character, Amit Chaudhuri, not to be confused, we are told, with the novelist who wrote this book. Friend of My Youth reflects on the nature of identity, the passage of time, the experience of friendship, the indignities of youth and middle age, the lives of parents and children, and, for all the humor that seasons its pages, terror, the terror that can strike from nowhere, the terror that is a fact of daily life. Friend of My Youth is fearfully and wonderfully made.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781681373393
Publisher:	New York Review Books
Publication date:	02/05/2019
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	176
File size:	848 KB

About the Author

Amit Chaudhuri is a novelist, essayist, poet, and musician. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he lives in Calcutta and the United Kingdom, where he is a professor of contemporary literature at the University of East Anglia. Friend of My Youth is his seventh novel. Among Chaudhuri’s other works are three books of essays, the most recent of which is The Origins of Dislike; a study of D. H. Lawrence’s poetry; a book of short stories, Real Time; a work of nonfiction, Calcutta: Two Years in the City; and two volumes of poetry, including Sweet Shop. He has made several recordings of Indian classical and experimental music, and the awards he has received for his fiction include the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, and the Indian government’s Sahitya Akademi Award.

Editorial Reviews

12/24/2018

This striking novel from Chaudhuri (A Strange and Sublime Address) tracks a writer by the same name returning to his boyhood home of Bombay for a book reading. This time, the place feels different—it’s after the 2008 terror attack, and his childhood friend Ramu is back in rehab. Amit doesn’t have anywhere to be aside from his reading and running an errand for his family. As he wanders the streets, Amit reflects on why he left Bombay. He scans bookshelves for his work and doesn’t see his titles, forcing him to reconsider his mark on the city. He also thinks about the sacrifices his parents made for his education; his mother had to sell her jewelry after the family fell on hard times. Amit speaks with a working man who recalls his parents from years ago, making him realize though Amit’s parents no longer live in Bombay, they still belong. Without the anchor of seeing Ramu, Amit discovers how tenuous his connection to the past becomes. In this cogent and introspective novel, Chaudhuri movingly portrays how other people can allow individuals to connect their present and past. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

"Chaudhuri’s measured, subtle, light-footed fiction is rich with hanging vignettes of domestic and urban life." —James Wood

"Amit Chaudhuri’s Friend of My Youth offers a thoughtfully meta exploration of the passage of time, the multiplicity of selves, and the way in which writing and place can connect the two." —Shelf Awareness

"With the publication of Friend of My Youth, Amit Chaudhuri is now the author of seven novels, greatly admired, especially by his peers . . . the drama of the self, spun from Chaudhuri’s meditations and recollections, is artfully composed and utterly absorbing." —Kate Webb, The Times Literary Supplement

"In this elusive, evocative fiction, a novelist's visit to his boyhood hometown of Bombay calls up memories of a longtime friend and a recent terrorist episode. . . . Anything but a conventional novel, its pleasures arise from a craftsman's writing and its subtle demands and rewards." —Kirkus, starred review

"A mini masterpiece. A really beautiful book. I love his honest, unsparing descriptions of himself, his weird, off-beat, unapologetic persona." —Financial Times, Everything Else podcast

“To paraphrase a title of Proust’s, a writer Chaudhuri has been compared to often, this is a remarkable record of pasts recaptured that had never been free in the first place.” —Michael Autrey, Booklist

"In this cogent and introspective novel, Chaudhuri movingly portrays how other people can allow individuals to connect their present and past." —Publishers Weekly

“What [Chaudhuri] does in this short novel, with exquisite delicacy, is show disconnection, vacancy and the physical world’s imperviousness to human action, even of the most violent kind.” —Esquire (UK) 

“Friend of My Youth is a taut, efficient book: part novel and part manifesto. It presents itself as a work of fiction about friendship, the experiences of youth and the city of Mumbai, but really it’s a kind of anti-novel: a book about the failures of fiction to account for the realities of memory.” —The Guardian
 
“Chaudhuri is an exceptionally subtle writer, a skeptical seeker rather than a postmodern show-off. However you classify it, this journey through the traces of his past earns its literary sleight-of-hand. . . . In a book that (in a good sense) marks time, the narrator prepares for his next ‘leap of life’. Like Benjamin’s Angel of History, which Chaudhuri does credit, these elegiac ruminations look backwards but move forwards.” —The Spectator

“This novel is ‘an assemblage of moments, of different kinds of awareness of the world, and even of writing.’ Like [Henry] Green’s novels it offers delight, it shimmers, you seek to catch hold of it and it slides away.” —The Scotsman

"[The narrator] remains unmoved by the memories Bombay evokes yet experiences an unsettling homesickness, a paradoxical state that is compellingly observed. He also likes to eat: miniaturist descriptions of the evolving food landscape are pin-sharp. The autofictional riffs are unshowy, often funny, and it all comes together as a textured reflection on the hold of the past." —Francesca Angelini, Sunday Times
 
“Fiercely intelligent . . . elegant. [Chaudhuri] combines a serious reflection on psychology and friendship with an examination of the artist’s relationship to real life.” —The Herald
 
“A common, and false, complaint leveled against Chaudhuri by some critics is that nothing ever happens in his fiction. This is as untrue as saying that nothing ever happens in Waiting for Godot. He’s at his best with surfaces, stacking and overlaying them to create startling effects.” —Financial Times
 
“What [Chaudhuri’s] work exemplifies is somebody who views the canon as everything, that there isn’t a form of canonical literature that makes him cleave to one culture or the other.” —Will Self
 
“I realized that I had no terms in my critical lexicon to communicate the delight and the pleasure that his writing had given me. I haven’t encountered such joyous and playful writing about walking or eating . . . as I have in Chaudhuri’s books.” —Sumana Roy, Los Angeles Review of Books
 
“Amit Chaudhuri is a master. This book is a hymn to our present and our past. In today’s noisy world, Chaudhuri’s words provide a home wherein we can contemplate the essential things in life.” —Nadeem Aslam

"What a beautifully lyrical composition. I love how it is pitched three-quarters of the way to fiction, but with an eloquent nod towards “real life”. In this sense, it possesses the fantasy of fiction, but the grit of the lived and experienced. It's an achievement." —Caryl Phillips
 
"Reading Friend of My Youth was very calming. A sort of relief. It re-arranged the nervous system: the sentences and paragraphs were in step with breath, with thought, with strolling; time is slowed down. I would not describe Amit as a miniaturist—although his books are short—no, he is an epic writer—his protagonists have made long journeys." —Deborah Levy

"An epiphanic, limpid work . . . a truly wonderful novel." —RTE Ireland

"Friend of my Youth is a mesmerizing book. I started it early one afternoon in Italy, out of a simple desire to dwell in the 1980s, and then found myself restless outside its force field… and was relieved to return to it. The book has many pleasures to offer, especially those of recognition (it's always nice to see Chunky Pandey being resurrected). And though at first its meditations on the nature of the self and memory seemed to resemble those found within the tradition of European modernism, I began to think as I read on, and became convinced by the end of the book, that more than anything by Proust, Gide, and Woolf, it comes close to illustrating the Buddhist theory of dependent origination." —Pankaj Mishra
 
"In my opinion, his most interesting book, entirely free of the anxiety of influence." —Jeet Thayil, Books of the Year, Scroll.in

"A mini masterpiece… He doesn’t really follow the conventions of what we think of as a novel, but is… pushing and stretching at those boundaries . . . I love his honest, unsparing descriptions of himself, his weird, off-beat, unapologetic persona . . . a really beautiful book." —Financial Times Culture Podcast

"I have read nothing like it . . . it has changed the novel . . . I can’t recommend it highly enough." —Georgina Godwin, Monocle Radio

From the Publisher

★ 2018-10-28

In this elusive, evocative fiction, a novelist's visit to his boyhood hometown of Bombay calls up memories of a longtime friend and a recent terrorist episode.

Returning to "the city of my growing up," the narrator learns that Ramu, an old schooldays friend he counted on seeing and regards as "what survives of the familiar" in Bombay, is in rehab. So he carries on with the main business of his visit, which is a reading from his latest novel. The narrator, who bears the author's name, concedes that "my writing is accused of coming directly from life." Later he'll say he is working on a book called Friend of My Youth that he's "pretty sure" is a novel. Novelists used to be coy about what was autobiographical in their fiction, and now what looks like autobiography is called autofiction. Chaudhuri's (Odysseus Abroad, 2015, etc.) seventh novel doesn't submit to one label, offering instead a medley of genres, from journal to travelogue to essay and memoir but little in the way of straightforward fiction. The narrator navigates streets and sites and the memories they kindle, many of which concern Ramu, a longtime heroin user. The writer gives an interview, visits a bookstore. The story is awash in mundane details, but the narrator is always sifting through them for resonance as he also sifts through different pasts. So he runs an errand for his wife and mother at an upscale shoe shop in the Taj Mahal Hotel, one of the targets of the terrorist attacks on the sea-swept city in 2008, when "men with AK-47s alighted from dinghies." The narrator ponders the work of repairing the raids' damage, connects it to Paul Klee's Angelus Novus and a passage from Walter Benjamin on the painting that flows smoothly back into terrorism and the Taj. The gray matter's colorful play recalls Virginia Woolf's disingenuous disclaimer early in A Room of One's Own: "I give you my thoughts as they came to me."

Anything but a conventional novel, its pleasures arise from a craftsman's writing and its subtle demands and rewards.

Kirkus Reviews