SOJOURN

A professor’s Berlin sojourn finds him meandering through its streets and storied past.

As in his two most recent novels, Chaudhuri places his main character in a city and lets him wander physically and mentally. The narrator is a 43-year-old academic on a four-month stint as a visiting professor at an unnamed Berlin university. In his flat, once occupied by Kenzaburo Oe, he’s bemused by the German toilet’s landing platform and realizes that the Nobelist once sat on the same throne. This is typical of Chaudhuri, the intersections of present and past and an understated humor, even when there’s a butt in the joke. The narrator meets a Bangladeshi poet who shows him around Berlin and then disappears for a while, to be replaced by a woman who brings him to a venue where people have been coming for decades to dance to older songs. Also constantly present with punctuating artifacts is the city’s sense of history: the site of the Berlin Wall; the World War II “rotten tooth” relic of a church’s bombed tower; a spot from which Jews were sent to the camps. These are “spaces in which you sense time, but also inhabit the viewpoint of those who’ve already been there”—leading to perspectives that are “intense but momentary.” Many points in this drifting chronicle are briefly intense, a product of the narrator’s close observation and glinting insights. A mere 140 pages, with some holding just one or two paragraphs, the book is only physically slight. It grips the mind, as much with appreciation as with frustration, and teases one into parsing what is real or autofiction, what is changeless or transient. A reader may even enjoy feeling a bit at sea, like the narrator: “I’ve lost my bearings—not in the city; in its history.”

A masterful writer in his own subtle, thoughtful, demanding genre.