[Book review] No Direction Rome

puffing out smoke, sniffing in coke

sipping on a screwdriver, living up the joke

liking Facebook pictures while hating that bloke

day job, blow job, book of job,

either choke on some artichoke salad

or choke on the absurdity of this joke

This is how I would have written the blurb of Kaushik Barua’s new novel No Direction Rome. Barua’s first novel, Windhorse, was a poignant fictional account of the Tibetans’ flight from their homeland, their struggle as refugees in India, and a vain battle of resistance. Switching gear and genre in his second novel, Barua delivers an edgy plot less, absurdity-of-existence novel.

The title is thought provoking and tongue-in-cheek. It’s a play on the phrase "All roads lead to Rome" and also refers to the cult Dylan lyrics "No direction home... like a rolling stone".

The protagonist, Krantik, is based in Rome, and though all roads may have led him to the city, he is not quite at home. He keeps asking for directions to well-known ancient ruins from strangers. On one occasion, a girl offers to walk with him, for she’s supposedly headed in the same direction. Later we get to know that she also wasn’t going there. There starts an open-ended affair, which involves Chiara, who keeps slashing her wrist, and Krantik, who keeps scratching his ass, worried that he’s dying of some bowel ailment or the other. Barua indulges in the cartography of urban loneliness, and delivers a map of this terrifying experience with finesse. Asking unknown strangers for directions to known ruins is some kind of metaphor of eternal loneliness. The novel is urgent, set in now-and-here, and also in nowhere. It’s languid and slow despite its fast pace of events – something like the Romantic poets who extracted abstractions from concrete imagery.

One is reminded of the Leonard Cohen song called "Tower of Song", where he says, “I said to Hank Williams – how lonely does it get? Hank Williams hasn’t answered yet but I hear him singing all night, a hundred floors above me in the tower of song.” Like Cohen in this song, Barua is aware of his genre, of the lonely tower in which he wishes to see his reflection – a tower inhabited by the likes of Nietzsche, Joyce, Eliot and others who have explored the alienation of modern life. A reader may miss it but there are self-aware passages by the narrator where he keeps talking about being well-read as an apology for various rants.

As stated at the beginning, the novel does not have a conventional plot – it is a comment on the plotlessness of life. It begins with Krantik’s fiancée Pooja attempting suicide in a canal in Amsterdam, and failing at it. There’s nothing more to her attempt than something in her head, which is not explored in detail. Towards the end of the novel, her brother threatens Krantik that if he tries to pull out of the marriage, it will be with dire consequences, for their father is an MP with goons and muscles, to which Krantik replies that he will tell his journalist friends that the muscled MP is a pedophile. Krantik wards off a threat with a threat, one form of power with another. He isn’t able to fight power with his usual powerlessness.

The novel is a series of events and interruptions of memory, a postmodern visitation of the modernist novel. The idea of a Jungian collective memory is evoked through turtles who probably know what the sea is without ever being there; the Foucaultian idea of madness as just non-normative is evoked through the imagery of Rome as a crazy city, inhabited by lunatics (forced on the streets and offices because fiscal tightening means that the insane can't be cared for in asylums any more). The book is full of events, which explore such ideas. There’s a cab driver who wants to fly into nothingness, and the protagonist is mesmerized, he cannot leap out of the taxi to save himself from this nihilistic urge. The novel critiques the modern institutions and methods of marriage, of capital, of social networking, of corporations. One could say it’s a modern slice-of-life novel. However, slices of life in writing are also contrived. All representations are. Barua’s is a brave attempt, but maybe in his next work in this genre, he needs to be more self-aware and self-deprecating of this contrivance.