UNKNOWN CITY

In Bagchi’s novel, a writer grapples with relationships with women—and his own past actions.

Memory, misjudgment, and midlife reckoning collide in this novel, which chronicles Arindam Chatterjee’s attempts to understand others and, belatedly, himself. The story follows the computer scientist-turned-writer as he excavates email archives and personal recollections from the late 1990s and early 2000s. At its core is Arindam’s intense, ultimately failed relationship with Supriya,a Jawaharlal Nehru University history scholar whose ideological passions and emotional silences remained opaque to him until it was too late. He also thinks about his interactions with Paroma, a poet friend who drifted out of his life; Lily Ann, an MFA student in the writing program who failed to match his intellectual expectations; and Monique, a Black American writer whom he underestimated, then re-evaluated. Bagchi threads these relationships into a novelistic exploration of male entitlement, the emotional labor of women, and the fallibility of memory. Arindam’s intellectual insecurity and self-importance are rendered with brutal honesty; his failures to listen to, understand, or perceive women as more than reflections of his own literary ambitions form a critical portrait of a man awakening to his own limitations through the act of writing. Bagchi’s work uses autofictional techniques, endless paragraphs, and a dark sensibility that calls to mind authors such as Karl Ove Knausgård. The prose is lucid, intelligent, sometimes self-indulgent, and peppered with references to Urdu poetry, campus Marxism, and literary ambition. The metafictional conceit of rewriting a failed first draft to “understand Supriya” can feel overly pat, but it gives the novel a recursive rhythm that reinforces its themes of misrecognition and revision. This is a novel of admission, rather than action—sometimes frustrating, often piercing, and with a view of male privilege that neither begs forgiveness nor evades blame.

Not a comfortable read, but an emotionally revealing one.