Baumgartner's Bombay

This is a stunning novel that cannot be summed up by the back of the book. Everyone can relate to it despite it's specific and foreign subject matter. Read it!

Baumgartner fed the cats on restaurant leftovers. Under the circumstances he had to patronize the cafes. It was believed that in India Hugo Baumgartner could begin a new life and thus his family had arranged for him to go there. It was felt that India would be safe because it was a colony of their neighbor, Britain. He departed for for the East from Venice. His mother could not be compelled to go with him. It had seemed like bedlam when he walked on what he assumed was British soil. He told Lotte years later that on his first day he ate curry. In Calcutta he stayed in a hotel on Middleton Row. He found he had to build a new language to suit the conditions. News from Europe became rapidly more alarming. During the war he was taken to an improvised camp at Fort William. Baumgartner was labeled a German and a hostile. He remained in captivity for six years. In the final camp he saw the Himalayas. He carried with him the habits of an only child and an isolated youth. In the present Baumgartner had a visitor, a blond-haired boy. After the war he had found a room off of Free Street in Calcutta. The city had been bombed. He was advised to go to Bombay. The boy Kurt laughed to have traveled so far to meet H. Baumgartner. When Hugo died, Lotte appeared to say that Hugo should be mourned and that his belongings should be respected.

Mrs Desai's novel opens with a lady called Lotte fleeing the scene of a murder. She's just lost a close friend, Hugo Baumgartner. When she gets back home, all that is left of Baumgartner's life are a few postcards sent by his mother during the Second World War. The German text on these postcards is always cryptic: "Meine kleine Maus," "Mein Haschen" "Liebchen..." "Do not worry, my rabbit, I am well. Are you well?" "Keep well, my mouse, and do not worry" "I am well..." and they're signed "Mama", "Mutti" or "M". And so the reader begins to follow Hugo Baumgartner's life, starting with his childhood in Berlin. At the age of about eight, his father, a Jewish furniture retailer, soon loses his business, his store is ransacked by the Nazis and he is taken to a concentration camp. Baumgartner and his mother are forced to leave their beautifully furnished apartment and hide in the former office of the shop. At school, Baumgartner's situation becomes unbearable: his classmates chant to him: "Baumgartner, Baum, hat eine Nase wie ein Daum" (Baumgartner's dumb, has a nose like a thumb.) Eventually, his survival in Germany becoming a matter of days, his mother agrees to Herr Pfuehl's idea to send his son to India, since he has a few connections there in the furniture production business. There are many moving scenes as the reader discovers, along with Hugo, the sights, sounds and smells of Calcutta and Bombay. And moving too, the life of this pathetic and insignificant man Baumgartner who simply does not belong. Neither to Hitler's Germany nor to India's society, where he is a perpetual "firanghi", foreigner, a wounded survivor. This novel is the achievement of a superior writer with a sharp perception about human nature, loss, solitude.

This is the first book I have read by Anita Desai. It was memorable and thoroughly satisfying. One could not say that it was enjoyable as that would betray the emotions experienced on reading the book. I came away enthralled, though disenchanted with the world and its occupants, to say nothing of being more than a little depressed.The eponymous character is a kindly, benevolent old man, a foreigner in India, who is totally out of kilter with the world in which he lives. His fondness for cats betrays his need for relationships, given the evident absence of personal contact in his everyday experiences. In many ways, the only satisfying aspect of his life is the past, where he spends much of his time reflecting. His sole relationship with any meaning is with another extremely unhappy, demoralised expatiate who hates everyting about the circumstances in which she now finds herself. Together, they make a sorry pair. He is kind, mild-mannered, gentle, unassuming and much put upon. She is much more aggressive, though an anchronism, living very much in the better days of yesteryear. The world in which they now live is extremely unfogiving and unkind to them. The past they left behind, however, was equally unattractive.The ending was in many ways a blessing. The misery of the surroundings and the leading characters will live in my mind for a long time, as will the conduct of the self-absorbed young foreigner who brought this tale to a climax. In many ways, he is the epitome of all that is unacceptable today. The small kindnesses he experienced are disregarded and his selfish demands take precedence over anyone else's needs.If you are looking for a fast-paced thriller full of action, you have come to the wrong place. If, however, you want to enjoy a real story which challenges all of the emotions as well as having a beginning, a middle and an end then this book will deeply move you.All in all, a very sad story, made all the sadder by some of the most beautiful, compact writing you will ever encounter.

Baumgartner's Bombay is a memorable and haunting tale of the holocaust and the resulting new wave of the dispossessed and grieving let loose on the world--in this case cast adrift in India. Baumgartner neither understands nor feels at home in the East--an incomprehension that is amply reciprocated by his new colleagues and acquaintances. The ending is a bit disappointing but the novel as a whole reverberates in the mind long after you put it down...