Amit Chaudhuri’s new novel is set in Paris, not in the part of the city that is dotted with grand old monuments and historic sites of cultural pilgrimage, but in the less salubrious Château Rouge area, which lends the book its title. The narrator is a writer, a close approximation of Chaudhuri, who is in Paris on a fellowship to write a book on Indian classical music. He rents a flat on Château Rouge, far from the elegant heart of Paris, constrained by his budget, and his first glimpse of the neighbourhood doesn’t augur well.
Even before he steps foot in the area, his suspicions are aroused. When Holly, “in charge of the incoming fellows”, uses the word “vibrant” to describe the ambience of the place, he says, “it made me think something was wrong.” Soon enough, his fears are confirmed. The locality is seedy and unkempt, inhabited by a sizeable immigrant population. His digs are in a state of disrepair—the toilet paper doesn’t have a holder, quel horreur!—and the neighbours don’t look like model citizens. All blazing red flags for a genteel soul from the Bengali upper crust, who judges people harshly for keeping their wardrobe on display while showing their flats to potential subletters on a Zoom call.
The writer and his wife, who is visiting briefly, are caught off guard one evening by a woman flaunting a male member (or is it a dildo?) surrounded by a bunch of raucous men. It is with good reason that this part of Paris is called “Little Africa”, though there are immigrants from other parts, too. Although the squalor and lack of polish offends our narrator’s lofty taste, he is delighted to forge a bond with a Bangladeshi peanut-seller. Not having any French, he is thrilled to speak Hindi with any desi he encounters on his rambles. As for food, he makes do with ready-to-eat fare from supermarket chains Franprix and Carrefour.
On an adventure
Without calling it out as such, the narrator models himself as a flâneur, as conceived by German thinker Walter Benjamin (1892-1940)—an aimless wanderer of the streets, keen observer of the vagaries of modern life, an engagé committed to serendipity. Episodic and meandering, Château Rouge reveals a similar loitering soul in its structure. The novel is an amalgamation of the fragments of thought the writer has as well as the scenes he witnesses during his peregrinations across Paris.
These sporadic utterances are not meant to serve the cause of the story. Rather, their coming together is part of a long project of articulating modernity, tracing its antecedents to Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous remark in Nausea (1938): “For the most commonplace event to become an adventure, you must—and this is all that is necessary—start recounting it.” The narrator admits that he has been turning this proposition in his head “for about fifteen years” and, rightfully, the line does describe Chaudhuri’s career as a fiction writer down to a T. The essence of Sartre’s dictum is writ large on his fine first novel, A Strange and Sublime Address (1991), as well as most other works of fiction he has written till the mid-2010s. Odysseus Abroad (2015) and Friend of My Youth (2017) signalled a shift in perspective, and refreshingly so, as the first focused on an eccentric uncle and the second examined the fate of a once-dear friend felled by addiction.
Despite the first-person narrator in both these novels, the reader’s attention remains trained on a central character who is a striking contrast to the author. Chaudhuri’s fine observational skills, with an undercurrent of droll humour, bring a singular edge to these two novels. Château Rouge, in contrast, feels like a return, even a regression, to the familiar, predictable ground of his early fiction.
Part of the problem with Château Rouge is the staid, somewhat academic, demeanour of the narrator. On the very first page, he remembers Kazimir Malevich’s painting Red Square when he hears the words “Château Rouge”. It immediately locates him and the reader in a certain milieu, as do subsequent allusions to James Baldwin, Ingmar Bergman, Ernest Hemingway, Woody Allen, and other cultural luminaries. Arresting as these references are, their effect, on even the most well-informed reader may be counterproductive.
Faced with such a cerebral intellect, the reader is often left staring at a wall put up by the narrator whose interiority seems impervious and unused to feeling emotions too intensely. Occasionally, a great meal at Il Padrino on Rue Custine, or the memory of a gift of Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast from his wife three decades ago, which he is yet to read, stirs a burst of feelings in the narrator. Otherwise, a stoic wariness seems to be his default mode—be it in his relationship with his daughter, at the death of his father-in-law (he does put his foot down when denied permission to sing a song of his choice at the memorial), and while navigating life in general.
Despite his somewhat repressive personality, the narrator does have an urbane eye, sensitive to the poetry and bathos of modern life. As migrant vendors scatter to escape a police raid on the streets, he is reminded of scenes he has witnessed in Venice and Rome. “There is no pursuit: just a dust storm,” he writes, referring to the Bangladeshi and African immigrants. “They stand, giggling under parapets, as if it were raining. Then they settle back, allowed a degree of familiarity, like leaves that are dislodged but not swept away.”
Elsewhere, he isn’t too clear with metaphors. One day, as he sees the “grunting dildo-brandisher”, who seems to haunt him every few pages, “remonstrating loudly and terrorising two young men she towers over,” the narrator is shocked by her open mouth, two front teeth missing. “I’m transported and confused,” he offers something of a non-sequitur. “It’s like Arjun nagging Krishna, ‘But show me the full range of your glory! and regretting it when he did.”
As a literary text, Château Rouge is likely to inspire fodder for academic discussions. Whether it will be enjoyed beyond intellectual ivory towers is another matter.