For some years now, Amit Chaudhuri has been running a successful tour company. Departures and arrivals fleck his novels like logbooks of long-distance travellers. A young boy spends his summer holidays visiting Calcutta; a visiting professor sojourns in Berlin; a student arrives in Oxford; a professor brings his son from the US to see his parents in Calcutta.

Travel is an essential life-vest in the start-up kit of literary realism. Journeys promise renewal; they can rescue, and revive, even the most flailing of plots. Chaudhuri’s dislocations, however, are brightly, proudly plotless. Nothing happens, or rather, nothing seems to happen in his novels. It’s a wonder they never sink.

Subscribe to the New Statesman and save 40% for 1 year!