In Teju Cole’s Open City, Julius, the protagonist, combines the sensibility of a postmodern flaneur with that of a rootless émigré, walking the streets of New York. Recovering from a broken relationship, Julius has encounters with strangers, where internal and external dialogues are deliberately left indistinct from each other. The novel’s experimental style is rich with subtle references to art, culture and contemporary thought. Cole expands the scope of the novel form both in terms of stylistic innovations as well by creating a new urban, rootless sensibility that downplays the outsider status of the protagonist.
Kaushik Barua has either read Cole or he should have. No Direction Rome, Barua’s second novel, is set in contemporary Rome; the protagonist Krantik is a rootless, Indian roamer on the streets of Rome, recovering from a failed engagement with a girl who tries to commit suicide in Amsterdam, asking strangers for directions to monuments he has no intention to visit. The similarities with Cole’s novel are obvious. Where Cole pulls off a literary coup, Barua bores the reader with utter tedium.
Barua perhaps intended to fashion the protagonist, Krantik, as an aimless, depthless contemporary global soul, who skims through surfaces of experiences, a kind of philosopher of meaninglessness. Krantik spends most of his time doping, thinking about sex or worrying about imaginary ailments. Krantik’s obsession with his body is meant to show his deeper (I wish!) existential anxieties. The novel is written in the first person, and it is Krantik’s rant that guides the reader painfully to the bitter end. Such philosophical and fictional ambitions should either be supported by talent or with reading. Barua displays neither.
The only mild relief that this novel offers is that it attempts to carry the historical and cultural weight of Rome lightly and focuses instead on contemporary city life, people who are drivers, bartenders, heads of multinational companies. Krantik works as a ‘techie’ in the city—and thank god he is not an artist or an archaeologist or novelist. Perhaps it is because Krantik is so vacuous that the grandeur of the city leaves him unmoved. The question, however, is—why Rome? The novel could have been set anywhere—Calcutta, Cairo, Paris or Patna. Unless the reason was the sorry pun on Rome (roam). If the novel was even slightly compelling, one could have asked more serious questions about how to evoke and demystify places as culturally layered and resonant as Rome is. One could have compared the book to Dessaix’s Night Letters and Caryl Phillips’ European Tribes. But these works, when they are conjured up in mind, leave one even less kind with Barua.
The novel begins with Krantik’s fiancé leaving Europe after attempting suicide. The novel concludes with the explanation for this failed attempt. Pooja attempts the suicide not for any particular reason apart from being confronted by a hopelessly unimaginative future that waits for her. The choices —all the human choices—are ultimately recognised as empty and meaningless. Krantik, not very different from Pooja in ability or ideology or, indeed, imagination—has to choose between death and life. From what we have seen, there is not much going for him either. As a last-ditch effort, to escape the ire of a boss who is gunning for him, he appeals to Chiara, a woman he has sex with occasionally, to run away with him, to start a new life, to be free. The appeal is summarily dismissed and Krantik is unceremoniously thrown out of the house by Chiara.
The other conceited trope Barua employs in the novel is an imaginary conversation between the turtles Kratik’s landlord keeps as pets. The turtles ask what are meant to be deep existential questions —what is a job, where do we go—and such tripe that echoes Krantik’s lonely ruminations. These insertions are neither funny, nor deep.
The blurb to the novel describes the book as “Violently funny and epically tragic, Barua’s writing is tragicomic genius. F…king brilliant.” Notwithstanding the fact that reviews are, after all, only opinions, such a description of the novel is grossly misleading. The book is an unmitigated tragedy, and epically disastrous.