‘No Place to Call My Own’ by Alina Gufran: Portrait of a writer as a self-sabotaging wreck

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. The 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