'' CHATEAU ROUGE '' : BOOK REVIEW SNIPPET

Chateau Rouge. By Amit Chaudhuri. Amit Chaudhri's latest novel is a quiet, intimate portrait of Paris seen through the eyes of an outsider, where overlooked streets, everyday encounters and the elusive workings of memory become a way of understanding the city - and oneself.

What does it mean to live in a new city? And what if that city is Paris? New cities make our author nervous and Paris is no exception. And the Chateau Rouge neighborhood in which he resides is a place where everything is unimpressive, '' except maybe its name.''

'' No one knows they are living in history.'' This sentence from the book opens up reflections on a host of issues. The sentence reminds me of Orhan Pamuk's opening lines in The Museum of Innocence :

" It was the happiest moment of my life, though I didn't know it.'' For questions such as if one is living in history or experiencing the happiest moments in life, we get the answer half way through the book, with the help of Jean-Paul Sartre, that quintessential Parisian writer, who in Nausea said :

'' For the most commonplace event to become an adventure, you must - and this is all that is necessary - start recounting it.''

In Chateau Rouge, not all commonplace events become adventures when the protagonist recounts them.

But the descriptions of the mundane and the role of memory become recurrent themes, as the narrator looks at the city and wanders in his own thoughts. 

In an age when we turn to ChatGPT and Google for everything, many feel there is little need to remember. But this slim novel makes us rethink how we find answers to our present and past through ChatGPT and Google.

Whether it is a city or our relations, what we make of them is how we remember and recount them. And that necessarily brings us to the importance of the word, be it spoken or as soliloquy.

Arundhati Roy in Mother Mary Comes To Me, calls this hunting down her language-animal.

She says, " I knew that if I could describe my river, if I could describe the rain, if I could describe feelings in a way that I could see it, smell it, touch it, then I would consider myself a writer. ''

!WOW! thanks Haider Nizamani, who teaches at IBA, Karachi.