Customer Reviews

Baumgartner's Bombay

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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...

The teen-aged Hugo Baumgartner is sent to Calcutta via Venice when his family's furniture business is destroyed by the Nazis, his father is sent to a concentration camp, and his mother has gone into hiding. His mother agrees to send her only son to India, but when he arrives he is imprisoned in an internment camp as a 'hostile alien'. After six years, he is released and ends up in Bombay where he befriends Lotte, the unhappy dancer, Farrokh, the owner of a cafe, and Kurt, the young Aryan druggie, but mostly he spends time with his assortment of cat-friends who make visitors to his small apartment so uncomfortable they resort to holding handkerchiefs to their noses.

The story opens with a murder and weaves present and past together in Desai's graceful style of prose, however it doesn't captivate the reader - or at least not this one. While I understood Baumgartner's life to be a miserable one, I didn't reach the point of empathizing with him. I understood the irony of his internment, and found humor in his exchanges with Farrokh and Kurt, but in everything I looked on as a passive observer

Baumgartner, a German Jew, gets to India as a teenager, "escaping" the Holocaust. He makes a living there until his Indian patron dies, then retires at an early age into poverty. He never gets over the death of his mother, who refused to emigrate. He is a totally passive personality whose one joy is caring for stray cats in his small apartment. Not only is he a dull protagonist, but Desai withholds the few interesting parts of his life until toward the end. Is Desai investigating bigger themes, by looking at the world and Indian society through the eyes of such a character? Is she trying to prove that even such a person is worth exploring? More likely the former, since this is not really an in depth character study. The events pallidly reflected are interesting, Desai is a good writer, Baumgartner arouses some feelings of empathy, so book is readable.

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.