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‘No Place to Call My Own’ by Alina Gufran: Portrait of a writer as a self-sabotaging wreck
Summary
Alina Gufran’s debut novel, ‘No Place to Call My Own’, is marred by a clichéd theme and a protagonist who is hard to sympathise withThe title of Alina Gufran’s debut novel, No Place to Call My Own, is a dead giveaway. In case you guessed it to be a story of alienation, identity crisis, and the search for an elusive “home" by a young and confused protagonist, you’d be spot on. To give credit to the writer, it does take chutzpah to venture into such a long-festering cliché of a theme, especially in a first book. A recent successful experiment with a similar subject was Devika Rege’s imperfect but edgy debut novel, Quarterlife (2023), portraying the angst of a generation of Indians who came of age in a nation bristling with communal tension and unbridled capitalism.
The 260-odd pages of Gufran’s novel that chronicle the misadventures of her protagonist Sophia, born to “an Arya Samaji Hindu mother and a Sunni Muslim father", unfortunately lacks both the craft and the imagination to pull off this feat. The novel’s unoriginality is worsened by the fact that Sophia is a deeply unlikeable character, epitomising the worst dysfunctionalities that mark young people of a certain vintage, most of whom are oblivious to the advantages they enjoy.
Also read: ‘The Comeback’ by Annie Zaidi: Art and friendship, tainted by some ugly business
Sophia is an aspiring filmmaker, whose life is largely bankrolled by her father. He funds her education abroad, as well as her rent in India, unless she is staying with a boyfriend or working at odd jobs that, mysteriously, pay for a rented flat in Bandra, that increasingly upmarket Mumbai neighbourhood, or for a tarot reading priced at ₹3,000, when Sophia is supposedly on the brink of penury. “Our entire generation is dealing with a rapidly disorienting loss of identity and self-belief through the fast-evolving features of social media," she goes on to say later as though such platitudes would justify the worst excesses of a group of misguided youths in their late 20s, who are grievously late to adulting, unlike those less fortunate than them.
The dominant narrative of Sophia’s life is shaped by her parents’ estrangement, resulting in a spiral of uncontrolled behaviours, including alcoholism, drug abuse, and reckless promiscuity. Sophia may have been inspired by the damaged heroines in the novels of Jean Rhys or Ottessa Moshfegh but, sadly, she doesn’t even come anywhere close to the lesser mortals in the novels of Coco Mellors. With her love for self-sabotage and inability to be financially prudent, her suffering feels staged, banal and gratuitous, a spoilt brat’s cry for attention from the world.
The reason behind this situation is primarily because Sophia’s life has a single-point focus: Sophia herself. She is self-involved to the point of being clinically narcissistic, thrives on self-pity, and is secure in the knowledge that there is always an indulgent parent, if not generational wealth, to bail her out whenever the need arises. These obvious entitlements allows her to do exactly as she pleases, with little regard to the consequences. And as far as poor choices go, Sophia’s track record is predictably terrible.
Falling in love with a wealthy douchebag who dumps her to marry someone else? Check. Continuing to obsess about him even after he has become a father? Check. Feeding off a toxic co-dependent friendship, while treating each other as punching bags? Check. Losing a decent boyfriend by ill-treating him? An abortion? An unlikely identity crisis leading to improbable self-transformation? Check. Check. Check.
The irony is deepened by Sophia’s periodic self-doubt, which could, just as well, be taken as the writer’s criticism of her own craft. “On most days, I was the cliche of a failed artist," Sophia says of herself. “I feel like a complete sham," is another typical sentiment. At film school, she feels like “a nervous debutante against whom the odds are stacked—perhaps due to the colour of my skin, or just my lack of talent." It’s hard enough to shore up much sympathy for a character traipsing around Dubai, Beirut, Prague and Indian megacities, desperate to belong to the charmed circle of the elite—but it’s pure agony to have to pretend to understand her loathing of the same people, or listen to her complaints about having been dealt a bad hand by life.
Sophia’s reckoning with her class, privilege and identity happens, first, through a rejection of her film script for being “not Muslim enough" and, second, as the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act break out all over India, leading to a pogrom against Muslims in Delhi during the pandemic. These events could have become the moral and ethical core of the narrative, except they are lost in the haze of Sophia’s solipsism.
Even her final leap of faith, taken partly as a reaction to the hostility against Muslims in India, would have been brave, had it not been for the inglorious legacy of self-interest she carries over from the past.
