In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Ananda Devi’s All Flesh is one of the year’s most startling, moving, and amazing novels.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
“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”
In her own words, here is Ananda Devi’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel All Flesh:
Of all the novels I have written, All Flesh holds a special place in my heart, because it led me on a very different path from those I tended to follow: an unexpected, strange wilderness that began with a quote by Henry Miller, with a painting of a full-fleshed woman, and with some idle reflections about people’s relationship with food as I was waiting in different airports in the US. I started writing it without knowing where it would lead me to, only with that image of a young girl who might have started life, with the throw of the dice, as an enormous baby. Her mind and her body became the place where the novel took place, and for once I didn’t ground the story in a specific country, although there are slight hints here and there that it might be Switzerland (I live in France, on the Swiss border). It is definitely set in a European country, not Mauritius or India where most of my novels are set. Despite this outwardly affluent setting, I feel the use of the word “wilderness” is apt, since my narrator, now an adolescent girl suffering from morbid obesity, has to make her way through the dangerous and relentlessly cruel paths of teenage harassment, amplified by the deleterious impact of social media. Abandoned by her American mother (a small link to the fact that the story originated when I was on a book tour there), she is nurtured by her loving, but deluded father, who tries to assuage her shame about her weight by telling her she was originally one of twin baby girls in the womb. He treats her as if she were twins, so he feeds both of them with his culinary feasts. For her, though, this myth means that she devoured her twin in the womb, so that she is now haunted by her shadow.
In the end, there is no place of safety for her, whether at home or in the society at large, where she is looked upon with disgust and condemnation for her supposed gluttony. It’s a novel about loneliness, about consumption and about the body – a place of safety and danger.
Music inspiration
I usually listen to music when I am writing. Mostly music without words so that the poetry doesn’t interfere with my own words. When I am not writing, I listen to Indian music and songs, to Western classical music and songs from the ’70s and ’80s when I was a student in London, to Mauritian music – a very eclectic mix! However, as I was writing All Flesh, a few pieces seemed to run in my head, mostly about loneliness, very melancholy, as a kind of ode to the utter solitude of my young narrator, trapped in her own body.
The first of those is a song I have loved forever: Eleanor Rigby, by the Beatles. There are many songs by the Beatles that I love, but this one, which is less known that the others, is an extraordinary alliance of the beauty of Paul Mc Cartney’s voice, of the wording and of the music.
Eleanor Rigby
Picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been
Lives in a dream
Waits at the window
Wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door
Who is it for?
All the lonely people
Where do they all come from?
All the lonely people
Where do they all belong?
This very strange and poetic line, wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door, makes me think of how none of us shows our true face to others. But it is also about invisibility: this is indeed one of the recurring themes in my books, whether it is very old people, transgender men and women or prostitutes in India, or an obese girl, who are so visible that we only see their outer selves and never stop to think about their inner selves, never stop to understand who they are and where they belong. It’s a song I can listen to again and again and never tire of it, discovering new meanings every time. Eleanor Rigby / Died in the church and was buried along with her name / Nobody came.
Nobody came.
Another piece accompanied the writing of a crucial and heart-breaking passage of the book, when, after so many years, the narrator’s mother comes back to see her, not expecting to see how huge she has become. The girl prefers to hide under the beautiful quilt her father bought for the occasion, watching her impossibly thin mother through a hole in the fabric. In the end, the mother will only have the courage to look at her hand and to hold it, never insisting on seeing her daughter again.
It was Vivaldi’s Stabat Mater that played while I was writing this, interpreted by Philippe Jaroussky and his ensemble Artaserse. I can only understand a few of the Latin words, of course, but it is about the Virgin Mary weeping in front of the cross where Christ has been crucified. The music and the voice fully convey this meaning, and I don’t think I have ever heard anything that seizes the heart and soul with so much pain and love and passion and compassion. As soon I hear the word dolorosa, I begin to weep. Oh Mother, fount of love, make me feel the power of sorrow, that I may grieve with you. I believe all mothers must feel these words as if they were spoken to them alone… Although, here, it was for the daughter that I cried.
Towards the end of the novel – one of the hardest passages I have written –, I listened to the Tunisian artist Emel Mathlouthi, in particular a song entitled Instant, from the album Ensen. It is sung in Arabic, a language I don’t understand, but so poignant is this song that I looked for the English translation. It is, again, about grief and loneliness. How can it not resonate with us in these terrible times? My narrator’s self-sacrifice became a metaphor for a humanity that is losing all sense of humanness and compassion, where Mammon and the gods of consumption reign supreme in the richest parts of the world, where money has become the only divinity for those who have the most, and the rest of the world is left to the ravages of misery, hunger and war:
How to explain what’s crushed inside me and that I don’t understand
I stand silent for singing deserted me
I look haggard at what’s surrounding me
I wish to not move or open my door
This is my state,
At this instant
As with Stabat Mater, her voice and the music say it all: no need to understand the language.
One of the characters in the book is a man called René (which means reborn in French), a carpenter who comes to free her when she is stuck in a doorway. He was homeless at one point of his life. He thus understands how she feels, this all too visible invisibility, as the firemen called in by her father to help her look in horror at her body. He is as thin as she is obese, but their solitude is the same. A love story emerges from this encounter. Trying to imagine René, I thought of a song from the end of the 1960s, sung by the French singer of Greek origin, George Moustaki: Le métèque. The title of the song is a pejorative word used by French people at the time for immigrants of Mediterranean origin. There is a weary but resilient acceptation of who he is in this poetic text, and I could imagine René, both singing it in his raspy smoker’s voice to my narrator and looking somewhat like George Moustaki himself, saying that he will come to his sweet prisoner, his soul-mate, his life source, he will come to her with his ugly immigrant mug, his wandering Jew’s face, his Greek sheperd’s look, a thief and a vagabond, and he will drink in her youth and will become, as she choses, a noble prince, a dreamer or an adolescent, and they will make of each day an eternity of love that they will live until their death:
Avec ma gueule de métèque
De Juif errant, de pâtre grec
De voleur et de vagabond
Je viendrai, ma douce captive
Mon âme sœur, ma source vive
Je viendrai boire tes vingt ans
Et je serai prince de sang
Rêveur ou bien adolescent
Comme il te plaira de choisir
Et nous ferons de chaque jour
Toute une éternité d’amour
Que nous vivrons à en mourir
This magnificent song haunted those of my generation and the next, as it spoke to all of us who had been judged on the basis of our appearances or our origins. Both my protagonists have felt the full impact of this judgement.
It isn’t easy to jump from a 1960s French song to an 18th century sufi poem sung in urdu by a Pakistani singer, Abida Parveen. But the theme of love and madness and wonder weaves a tapestry that encompasses both songs, and perhaps all my song choices. Entitled Mujhe Bekhudi, from the album Raqs-e-bismil, it begins with a quote from the renowned sufi poet Rumi:
Bewilderment has absolved me of both worlds
This is the consequence of awakening from my dream.
It then moves to a poem by Hazrat Shah Niaz, enlarging upon the theme of moving beyond the quotidian preoccupations of our worldly existence to achieve a different way of being and of seeing, which is one of the themes of this book and of several of my novels:
The eyes of an anguished heart open
No longer moist, bereft of tears
The perplexed vision
Remained unmoved… Devoid of response
The soul heard an unusual sound
That plucked at the strings of life
As wondrous love revealed itself
I read these verses and listen to them and wonder what the poet is really saying. Perhaps it is that when the heart first opens itself to this other way of seeing, it doesn’t know how to respond, remaining initially unmoved, until it hears the true sound of the universe? This is an image frequently used in sufi poetry, where the language and symbolism of “romantic” and sensual love are transformed to express a transcendent form of devotion. The sufi’s quest is an individual and lonely one, subsumed in the beauty of music, poetry and dance through which a kind of grace is achieved. My narrator too achieves a kind of transcendance through her inner quest. I also hope that, despite the difficult subject of my novel, I too am able to guide the reader along its dark roads through the power of writing and poetry.
My narrator lives in a half-fictional world, created by her father’s invention of a ghost twin and by the “stories” made up about her on social media. She ends up thinking that her love story, too, is a fiction. This brought to my mind a beautiful Tracy Chapman song, Telling stories, which is about how we fill in the spaces between each other or even in our minds with stories that we tell ourselves. The video that accompanies this song shows Chapman travelling in a subway car and seeing the people around her as stories, which is also what Virginia Woolf used to do when travelling in a train: she would look at them and invent their lives in her own mind, which might result in short-stories or characters in her novels.
There is fiction in the space between
The lines on your page of memories
Write it down but it doesn’t mean
You’re not just telling stories
There is fiction in the space between you and me
(…) between
You and reality
You will do and say anything
To make your everyday life
Seem less mundane
The entire song is like a short-story in itself: A fabrication a grand scheme / Where I am the scary monster / I eat the city
These last lines seem to describe so well what goes on in the mind of my narrator…
I eat the city.
The devouring monster that my protagonist can seem to be is a reflection on our overwhelming consumption, which will in fact devour our world. The idea of the city as the place where solitude consumes us too has long been part of my imagery. The poetry of T. S. Eliot has been ever-present as an inspiration. In this case, I thought of the Preludes:
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
(…)
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
This last image brings us back to Eleanor Rigby picking the rice thrown in front of a church, probably because she is hungry. But also, this infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing, what is it?
The compassion that we are losing so fast?
The music that I hear in my mind when I read this poem of Eliot is a song by Gerry Rafferty that I used to listen to during my student years: Baker Street.
Winding your way down on Baker Street
Light in your head and dead on your feet
Well, another crazy day, you’ll drink the night away
And forget about everything
This city desert makes you feel so cold
It’s got so many people, but it’s got no soul
And it’s taken you so long to find out you were wrong
When you thought it held everything
I realise that, the older I get, the more I go back to the music that enthralled me as a young woman finding her own feet. I think these songs would have helped my narrator too. They definitely helped me shape and define her as I embarked in this rather harrowing, but ultimately fulfilling novel.
Born in Mauritius, Ananda Devi is a multi-award winning novelist, short-story writer and poet. Translated into a dozen languages, she is considered a powerful voice in modern African writing in French. Winner of the 2024 Neustadt International Prize for Literature for the entirety of her work, she holds a PhD in social anthropology from SOAS, London, where she lived for several years. She has also lived in Congo-Brazzaville and currently resides in Ferney-Voltaire, France. In 2023 she won the Grand Prix de l’Héroïne Madame Figaro for Sylvia P., a biographical essay on American poet Sylvia Plath; the Prix Étonnants Voyageurs for her novel Manger l’autre (2018). In 2015, she was featured at the PEN World Voices Festival in New York. In 2014, she was awarded the Prix du Rayonnement de la langue et de la littérature françaises by the Académie Française. She won the Prix Mokanda (2012). She was made a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in 2010 and won the Prix des Cinq Continents de la Francophonie (2006) for Ève de ses décombres, published in English as Eve out of Her Ruins (2016).