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A Novel
by Ananda Devi
Book Reviewed by:A ticking bomb of teenage savagery that blows the hypocrisies and prejudice of society to smithereens.
Bullied at school with near-hellish doggedness by cold-hearted classmates and fattened at home with increasingly extravagant feasts by an overindulgent father, the voracious narrator of All Flesh trudges through her teen years certain that her heft is because she has absorbed her twin sister in utero and is now eating, and living, for two.
As those around her look down on her corpulence, she struggles to see who she might be beyond such narrow-mindedness. When a near-fatal incident unexpectedly brings a man and a heady experience of the body's other pleasures into her life, she gets a decadent taste of a future she had never dared to imagine. But she is beset once more by sharp tongues and beady eyes until, finally, she devises a drastic way to turn the tables on her tormentors and the whole unjust world. But will her coup de grâce prove self-possessed, or self-destructive?
In All Flesh, Ananda Devi's keenly lyrical prose presents a darkly humorous mirror that bitingly reflects and shatters the double standards around how we talk about bodies, women, beauty, and food, and how society consumes, obsesses over, and vilifies humanity's excesses.
Excerpt
All Flesh
I devour myself in delicious painlessness.
A lake of blood clots around me. All my short life, I've defied biology with my flesh. Now, I defy biology with my death.
The eye fixed on me, binding me to millions—billions—of other eyes, only steels my resolve to see my sacrifice through to the end. At last, I'm not just something to belittle and laugh at; at last, I'm free to relish, savor, eat this morbid fascination right up. I used to live to consume; I used to be seen as nothing but what went into my mouth and got digested in my guts and then was expelled. What identity I had was permanently impermanent. This attention at long last is sweet revenge for so many years as an outcast. Now, I can sear their retinas in turn; now, I can brand their thoughts with the red-hot iron of my ruin. Now, at last, I can have my just deserts for their onslaught of cruelty: I will haunt their nightmares.
Forgive me for starting this story with its bodily, unpalatable origins - ...
All Flesh is certainly not to be entered casually. It's unflinching in its look at the struggles of day-to-day life for someone dealing with physical health problems and systemic fatphobia at the same time. On this front, it can make for deliberately uncomfortable reading, confronting damaging societal prejudices head-on. The language throughout is emotionally charged, with the narrator often using controversial and harsh words to describe herself. While this could prove triggering for some, it highlights the lived experiences of many people. Namely, our protagonist has faced such relentless bullying for so long that she begins to internalize and believe the negative views of herself held by others. The most successful aspect of the novel is the dynamic introduced by the phantom twin that haunts the main character. She envisions this twin as the embodiment of everything she is not, everything that society expects her to strive for. In this way, the twin comes to represent the idealized beauty standards that haunt many young women and girls...continued
Full Review
(940 words)
(Reviewed by Callum McLaughlin).
Mauritius is an African island nation found in the Indian Ocean, east of Madagascar. Its location between the African and Asian continents and its colonial history mean the country is today home to a variety of cultures, giving rise to a vibrant literary scene with works written in several different languages.
Though some key titles were previously made available in English, a recent interest in bringing Mauritian literature into the language, driven by a handful of passionate translators, has allowed more of the country's fiction—both old and new—to reach a wider international audience, including Ananda Devi's All Flesh, originally published in 2018 and later translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman. This trend seems set to ...
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