Amit Chaudhuri Explores Paris in Ninth Novel Château Rouge

When an Indian writer arrives in Paris for a prestigious fellowship, he occupies a capacious yet grimy flat in the 18th arrondissement.

Discovering Little Africa in the Shadow of the Sacré Coeur

Situated in the shadow of the Sacré Coeur, Château Rouge is affectionately known as Little Africa. At first glance, the locale appears unimpressive to the newly arrived novelist. With its dirty pavements and absence of outwardly French cafés, he laments that to live in Paris and be separated from an idealised version of the city would be dreadful.

The perspective shifts when the narrator’s wife arrives. She astutely reminds him that Château Rouge is precisely the kind of neighborhood Ernest Hemingway would have inhabited—not some fancy made-up place. That single remark frees the narrator to chart the uncharted, documenting his daily rhythms, which include frequent trips to an M & S food hall, and appreciating the everyday moments that make up his surroundings.

Subtlety, Expatriate Realities, and Musée d’Orsay Encounters

Amit Chaudhuri has earned praise as a writer of great subtlety. In Château Rouge, that nuance registers less through the intricate poetry of his earlier novels and more through the specific ambivalence of the narrator’s initial reactions. While viewing Monet’s paintings in the Musée d’Orsay, an African man appears before him—someone the narrator surmises is from the colour of his neck. The narrator feels a resistance: as if [the man] was a reminder of some kind, perhaps recalling the very environment he briefly escaped.

Priced at £14.99 and spanning 195 pages, the novel examines the narrator’s inherent separateness. While he connects linguistically with Pakistani and Bengali immigrants, his class and social standing clearly distinguish him from that community. Rather than descending into contemporary alienation, Chaudhuri uses these dynamics to expand the expatriate perspective, offering a fresh history of the city’s lesser-observed streets.