A story of flesh

Ananda Devi is a prolific francophone writer from Mauritius, whose grotesquely wonderful novella Manger L’autre(2018) is now out in an English translation by Jeffrey Zuckerman (Pushkin Press, 2026). Titled All Flesh, it’s narrated by a teenager who was born as an enormous baby with an insatiable hunger, and her body has been expanding exponentially ever since. Her father, who takes care of her, claims she devoured a twin sister while in their mother’s womb, so he isn’t cooking for one daughter, but two. What follows is an excerpt from the first few chapters of the book.

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Forgive me for starting this story with its bodily, unpalatable origins — although doesn’t everything begin and end thus?

Everything, after all, is a story of flesh. Everything, in the end, comes down to this: our known yet inherently unknowable roots in our mothers’ wombs. Let us begin, then, with the orgasm of living.

Who could possibly claim to have unlocked this secret? Nine months spent there, and still a realm of utter mystery. Still half-formed, yet all is decided there. Was there really a shadow at my side for these few months, a sister? Or would she prove to be the first victim of an already-insatiable appetite? She apparently made the ultimate sacrifice, bearing the blue mantle of saints so that I might survive. And so she was granted only the time for a breath, an ethereal stroke of my cheek, a prayer to the gods of the living, before passing away and passing along an obsession. My mother’s womb has remained a closed book to me. What I do know is that I survived: I, the Darwinist. While my sister, my double, my unknown, was absorbed into my tissues and my organs, and along with her went all my humanity.

Let us turn to the facts.

After precisely nine months and ten days, those ten days having stretched out as long as the nine months before, my mother gave birth to a pink elephant. It weighed twenty-two pounds and eight ounces: hardly an excessive weight for a baby elephant; certainly a record for a baby human. When she delivered, my mother finally gave in to the shock she’d repressed all through her pregnancy, even as her slim body took on gargantuan proportions: she shrieked like a madwoman.