Baumgartner's Bombay [Hardcover]

Anita Desai (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 4, 1989

This novel is the story of Baumgartner's tragic life and death. It examines his childhood in a Jewish bourgeois family in Nazi Germany and his despatch to India where he is interned in a camp. After the war he lives a life of loneliness, ending with poverty and mental instability.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This ninth novel by Desai ( Clear Light of Day ; Games at Twilight ), a professor at Mount Holyoke College, reflects the author's background: her mother was German, her father Indian. The novel's hero, Hugo Baumgartner, is a perpetual outsider. Raised in the comforts of a rich Berlin merchant family, he narrowly escapes the Nazis by fleeing to Calcutta. There, after some success at starting over, he is imprisoned alongside dedicated Nazis by indifferent Anglo-Indian authorities. After the war comes the upheaval of partition. Now, in the present, Baumgartner is spending his declining years in a seedy cat-filled room off a back street in Bombay. He accepts the hand life has dealt him: "Acceptingbut not accepted; that was the story of his life. . . . In Germany, . . . his darkness had marked him the Jew. . . . In India, he was fairand that marked him the firanghi foreigner." Having survived so much, a chance encounter with a dissipated German hippie brings Baumgartner the fate he had seemed, until now, to have eluded. Desai's language reveals deep knowledge of both German and Indian ways, and her rich evocation of both settings is superb. This is a quirky book, occasionally irritating in its appropriation of history for its own purposes; but Desai's artful control of her narrative's agenda re sults in a compelling fiction.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Born in Germany, protagonist Harry Baumgartner escapes to Calcutta as a boy after his family suffers the rise of Hitler and the simultaneous fall of the Baumgartner fine-furniture business, as well as the destruction of their Jewish heritage. Imprisoned during the war as a hostile alien, Hugo moves at war's end to Bombay, where the novel--told in flashbacks--begins. Here he eventually finds his main happiness in the many cats who take over his shabby rooms. The story becomes contrived when Hugo befriends Kurt, a young, blond German hippie and dope addict whose sordid adventures in India could not have been experienced by one so young in so short a time--though they are excellently described. Still, Desai merits strong praise for her compellingly realistic descriptions of Indian life.
- Glenn O. Carey, Eastern Kentucky Univ., Richmond
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 229 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; First Edition edition (March 4, 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0394572297
• ISBN-13: 978-0394572291
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #594,084 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Anita Desai at her best, March 29, 2004

By 

HORAK (Zug, Switzerland) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Baumgartner's Bombay (Hardcover)

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.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars That's what happens, when two worlds collide....., June 19, 2001

By 

Alistair Sinclair (Dubai, United Arab Emirates) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Baumgartner's Bombay (Paperback)

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.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars An okay read, December 20, 2006

By 

Aditya Dua "Book Worm" (Stanford, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: Baumgartner's Bombay (King Penguin) (Mass Market Paperback)

I read this book on a long plane ride. Well, it was okay...not special, though intermittently interesting. I guess my main problem was that I could not quite empathize with the main character Hugo Baumgartner. As another review says - he is a passive character caught up in terrible events. Yeah, it sucks to be him - but he didn't seem to put in much effort into making his life more worth living! The parts involving his interaction with the cafeteria owner Farookh are amusing. The parts describing his childhood back in Germany are cute. The other parts (the camp, Calcutta etc.) are just okay.

Another problem I had was that India has been potrayed by the author in excessively poor light. I know that over population, poverty, squalor etc. are major problems all Indian cities are faced with - but seriously, is that all Anita Desai knows about India? Being an Indian, it is a shame that she has nothing positive to say about a diverse and fascinating country with a rich culture.

Well I guess 3/5 sounds about right for this book.