All Flesh - by Ananda Devi (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"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

"Caught between shame and fetishization, [the narrator] struggles to imagine a self not defined by the shape of her body... Excavating the moral fantasies we build around bodies, desire, and gender, All Flesh asks where the line is drawn between being self-possessed and self-destructive." -- Linnea Gradin, Electric Literature

"An elegant, feverish work of psychological literary horror. All Flesh is an absolute masterpiece of repugnantly beautiful prose." --Lucy Rose, author of The Lamb

"The ghost twin is a brilliant metaphor for the sense that so many women and girls have that their true self is thin and perfect while their actual body is a cruel lie." --Kirkus Reviews

"Devi excels at denouncing the tyranny of image worship, simultaneously obsessed with perfection and fascinated by monstrosity." --Le Temps

"Devi offers a metaphor for a society gorged on superfluities . . . where no one is safe from the gaze of the other." --Valérie Marin La Meslée, Le Point

"A sustained act of craft, from first page to last, for a story that is universal but violent . . . Monstrous, but perfect." --Le Soir

"A clear-eyed and dark sense of humor... Ananda Devi refuses to be labeled or confined to the categories and canons of postcolonial literature." --Nicolas Weill, Le Monde

About the Author

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.