For a lot of major writers like Don DeLillo or Philip Roth, their novels become shorter and more impressionistic towards the latter stages of their careers—as style crystallises with age, brevity becomes an embedded virtue of sorts. Amit Chaudhuri, however, has been writing these short, observational, impeccably crafted short novels since the beginning of his career; his first, A Strange and Sublime Address, was published in 1991. Three decades later, the observations remain razor-sharp and the sentences as languorously beautiful as ever.
Chaudhuri’s latest book, a short novel called Sojourn, follows the unnamed protagonist through a six-month residency in Berlin circa 2005, a guest professorship. He isn’t sure whether he has been to this city before—and of course, less than two decades ago, this was actually two cities, before the…
