‘Unknown City’: Amitabha Bagchi is back with a bang with Arindam Chatterjee from ‘Above Average’

A middle-aged Bengali man spending more than three hundred pages of a fairly large book talking about his past love failures may seem like a typically indulgent male idea and not very enlightening. It’s not the kind of book you presume would offer anything more than surface-level summaries of the relationships. It’s definitely not the kind of book you presume would make you start thinking about your own relationships and the balance of power, love, lust, emotions, anxieties, and fear in them. Yet, much like Bagchi’s previous work, Above Average, which Unknown City is a successor to, lulls you into a false sense of flatness before it suddenly hits you with something you weren’t quite ready for.

Inhabiting a story

Unknown City unfolds like a conversation between Arindam Chatterjee, whom we first meet in Above Average, and the reader. It’s not simply a story told in the first person – it feels like it’s being narrated to you by the lead player during a late-night post-beer conversation in your drawing room. You can almost hear the voice quiver, the change of pitch, the crying and the sobbing, and the self-deprecatory heaviness of the voice. Before describing particularly rough periods of his personal life, which may or may not involve another person,...

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