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A wild, bomb-throwing teenage revenge plot that skewers the cults of consumerism and the body beautiful.
Ananda Devi's protagonist is tormented at school because of her weight and is haunted by the sister her father believes she devoured in the womb. This, she thinks, is how he accounts for her enormous size: she is not one but two.
Her father is gleefully devoted and plies her with increasingly indulgent feasts; at school her fellow students and even teachers seek to humiliate her with an almost demonic insistence; in the midst of all this she struggles to see who she is beyond the world's perceptions of her and her size.
When she gets an unexpected, heady taste of the other pleasures of the body, she briefly feels the radiant possibility of another kind of life. But the great eye of the mob turns on her once more and she devises one drastic, final, self-destroying way to turn the tables on her persecutors and the whole unjust world.
In Hungering, Devi deploys keenly lyrical prose to stage a revenge plot with dark humor that tears apart the hypocrisies around how we talk about bodies, women, beauty, obsession, and consumption, and how society consumes, obsesses over, and vilifies the Other.
Born in Mauritius, Ananda Devi is one of the leading francophone writers of the Indian Ocean. Among her many awards are the 2024 Neustadt Prize and the Prix de la langue française, and she is the author of novels, short stories, nonfiction, and poetry. Her books available in English translation are Indian Tango, Eve Out of Her Ruins, The Living Days, and When the Night Agrees to Speak to Me.
Jeffrey Zuckerman is a translator from the French of books by the artists Jean-Michel Basquiat and the Dardenne brothers, the queer writers Jean Genet and Hervé Guibert, and the Mauritian novelists Ananda Devi, Shenaz Patel, and Carl de Souza. A graduate of Yale University, he has been a finalist for the TA First Translation Prize and the French-American Foundation Translation Prize, and has been awarded a PEN/Heim translation grant, the French Voices Grand Prize, and fellowships from MacDowell and the National Endowment for the Arts. For the entirety of his work, he was named a Chevalier de l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government.
Ananda Devi's protagonist is tormented at school because of her weight and is haunted by the sister her father believes she devoured in the womb. This, she thinks, is how he accounts for her enormous size: she is not one but two.
Her father is gleefully devoted and plies her with increasingly indulgent feasts; at school her fellow students and even teachers seek to humiliate her with an almost demonic insistence; in the midst of all this she struggles to see who she is beyond the world's perceptions of her and her size.
When she gets an unexpected, heady taste of the other pleasures of the body, she briefly feels the radiant possibility of another kind of life. But the great eye of the mob turns on her once more and she devises one drastic, final, self-destroying way to turn the tables on her persecutors and the whole unjust world.
In Hungering, Devi deploys keenly lyrical prose to stage a revenge plot with dark humor that tears apart the hypocrisies around how we talk about bodies, women, beauty, obsession, and consumption, and how society consumes, obsesses over, and vilifies the Other.
Born in Mauritius, Ananda Devi is one of the leading francophone writers of the Indian Ocean. Among her many awards are the 2024 Neustadt Prize and the Prix de la langue française, and she is the author of novels, short stories, nonfiction, and poetry. Her books available in English translation are Indian Tango, Eve Out of Her Ruins, The Living Days, and When the Night Agrees to Speak to Me.
Jeffrey Zuckerman is a translator from the French of books by the artists Jean-Michel Basquiat and the Dardenne brothers, the queer writers Jean Genet and Hervé Guibert, and the Mauritian novelists Ananda Devi, Shenaz Patel, and Carl de Souza. A graduate of Yale University, he has been a finalist for the TA First Translation Prize and the French-American Foundation Translation Prize, and has been awarded a PEN/Heim translation grant, the French Voices Grand Prize, and fellowships from MacDowell and the National Endowment for the Arts. For the entirety of his work, he was named a Chevalier de l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government.
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Reviews
"Sensual and provocative . . . the narrative hurtles through a series of striking twists, driven in part by the pesky inner voice of the narrator's twin sister. An epigraph from Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer sets the carnal and gleefully filthy tone, and Devi never lets up. The reader won't be able to look away from this singular work."
Publishers Weekly, starred review
"It's rare you'll have read a book quite like All Flesh. It's a true horror story - but instead of the usual ghosts and suspense, it provides a mirror that reflects our societal prejudices back to us. (That's the real horror.) It follows a 16-year-old girl born with an insatiable hunger, overfed by her father and subjected to constant torment by her peers. Ananda's absorbing narrative been described as 'repugnantly beautiful prose', which captures it perfectly - and Jeffery's masterful English translation hooks you from the beginning. A poignant - and often disturbing - reflection on beauty, belonging, obesity and recognition, that will repel and draw you in, all at the same time."
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