Annabel Rice - The Old Man and the Seine

Few characters seem quite so dissatisfied with their housing as Amit Chaudhuri’s. Whether in the dingy Oxford dorm of Afternoon Raag (1993) or the cramped Berlin studio of Sojourn (2022), his stories often begin at the same point: with a narrator piqued by his rented lodgings. At the start of Chaudhuri’s ninth novel, the unnamed protagonist arrives with his wife and daughter in the Château Rouge area of Paris, a quartier known as ‘Little Africa’. He is there for a writing residency and is braced for a ‘historical grottiness’ that feels ‘truer to the experience’ of the city than perfume. The pavements are strewn with cabbage leaves and peanut shells, the air thick with the scent of smoked fish and KFC. But to be in his rented flat, with its faded bedding and grimy surfaces, is ‘to be flooded by a sort of neglect. Things seemed wrecked, flattened, or missing.’ He laments that he ‘would not know what it meant to live in Paris’ – the ‘Paris of Proust’s house and Baldwin’s digs’, nor the tree-lined boulevards walked by Baudelaire’s and Walter Benjamin’s flâneurs.

If the novel begins as the journal of a disaffected tourist, it is soon diverted by an off-hand remark from the narrator’s wife, with a different kind of literary inheritance: ‘if Hemingway were living in Paris, this is where he’d be,’ not ‘some fancy made-up place’. This apparently simple statement conceals the question at the centre of the novel: what forms of experience remain possible once a place has been exhausted by global culture? Château Rouge makes a case for remaining out of step, for being slightly ill at ease. The view from the narrator’s unkempt apartment relieves him from nostalgia and the demand to present himself as a global citizen. He turns instead to the sensory minutiae of what is close at hand and the idea of a slower, contemplative cosmopolitanism starts to take shape, one grounded not in hyperactivity or networking, but in aimless conviviality.

The novel is composed of three largely plotless accounts of the narrator’s visits to Paris. These seem to be based on Chaudhuri’s own trips to the city: the first takes place in 2018 and 2019 while he was writing Finding the Raga (2021), his book on the melodic pattern of