Book Review: No Easy Redemptions in This Unknown City

The narrative of Unknown City is less interested in the drama of failed relationships than in what is left behind after certainty has eroded.  At its heart, Amitabha Bagchi’s novel is about the slow unlearning that evolves as time passes, the kind that does not arrive through revelation, but through repetition, doubt and hindsight. As a ‘jump sequel’ to Above Average, the book returns to Arindam Chatterjee decades later, not to complete an arc, but to ask whether arcs ever truly close.

Where Above Average was aware of the ways in which memory fixes itself in time, Unknown City is more interested in how memory frays, distorts and occasionally disappears altogether.  The book can be read on its own, but it gains added depth if you remember the earlier novel. Where Above Average showed how certain moments stay sharply preserved in memory, Unknown City is more interested in how memory changes, fades, or even misleads us.

Now nearing fifty, Arindam looks back on his life through a series of remembrances,  past loves, friendships, academic spaces, cities once inhabited and partly abandoned. These memories are not confessions as one thinks of the word; they feel makeshift, as though each memory is being tested rather than asserted. Bagchi allows the past to change shape as Arindam revisits it, exposing how meaning is often assigned retroactively, once emotional distance makes self-examination possible.

In Above Average, Arindam once jumped forward in time mid-story, noting how a small detail, the colour of the ink he used in class — was remembered years later in an email from a friend. Memory seemed reliable, almost neatly archived. In Unknown City, emails appear again, but they serve a different purpose. They do not confirm memory; instead, they expose its gaps. Old messages resurface with versions of events that Arindam barely recalls or remembers differently. The past, once confidently narrated, now feels uncertain The past, once confidently narrated, now feels provisional.

What emerges most clearly is Arindam’s growing discomfort with his earlier assumptions — about women, about intimacy, about his own moral positioning. He recognises how easily his masculinity, even when softened by self-awareness and intellectual openness, became an obstacle to genuine connection. The novel’s strength lies in showing how such missteps are rarely dramatic. They are subtle, habitual, shaped by environments that reward confidence and entitlement while masking their costs.

Place has an important role to play in this reckoning. The cities travelled in Unknown City are not mere settings but emotional structures that hold memory in place. Delhi, Baltimore, New York, Ann Arbor and Bombay appear and reappear, each carrying its own moral temperature. Relationships form, stretch and fracture according to where they are lived. Bagchi is particularly attentive to how geography dictates power, who moves, who waits, who compromises. In this sense, the “unknown city” is not a single location but the emotional terrain one enters when certainty about belonging begins to falter.

The conversational first-person voice strengthens this effect. Arindam sounds as though he is thinking aloud, circling back to memories, reconsidering them, sometimes lingering too long. At points, this repetition slows the pace of the novel, especially when one relationship occupies a large portion of the book. A tighter structure might have made the book more focused. Yet the repetition also feels true to life; unresolved memories often return in loops.

However, there is a danger of the narrative can become repetitive, particularly when one relationship dominates a large portion of the book.   But yes,  this perhaps deliberate structural choice also mirrors the way unresolved memories linger and replay themselves.

Bottom of Form

 Unknown City resists tidy endings because it is fundamentally sceptical of them. Growth here is incremental and incomplete. Understanding arrives late  and, even then, it does not redeem the past so much as complicate it.

What ultimately distinguishes Unknown City is its refusal to offer easy redemption. Arindam’s self-awareness does not magically repair the past. Instead, Bagchi presents self-knowledge as a slow, imperfect process.   The novel is not about becoming better so much as becoming more attentive: to other people’s subjectivities, to the limits of one’s own empathy, and to the ways time quietly rearranges what we once thought we knew.

It is a thoughtful, inward-looking novel that asks readers to inhabit a consciousness that is flawed, self-questioning and, at times, painfully honest. The result is a mature, reflective novel about memory, masculinity and the uneasy work of looking back,  not to relive the past, but to finally see it clearly.