Customer Reviews

Weight Loss

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"Weight Loss", like the rest of the author's books, is primarily about the profundity and absurdity of life, seen largely through the filter of promiscuity. Only this time, it really isn't so at all. "Weight Loss" deals with the story of a highly intelligent, self-deprecating individual, Bhola, who decides to give up all that makes sense and spend his life in the indefatigable pursuit of his sexual fantasies. There's almost no limit to the range of his sexual, and other perverted desires, and Chatterjee makes his protagonist live them all out, very explicitly, during the course of the book.

All that would have been fine, and in fact, even potentially interesting and humorous in a twisted sort of way, but Chatterjee clearly leaps across the fine line which divides the subtle and the poignant from the affected and the repugnant. In "Weight Loss", the situations are absurd and gross: the protagonist defecates in the teachers' room in his school; almost tops the country in his high-school examinations, but chooses to go to some unheard of college in some god-forsaken place to pursue a husband-and-wife vegetable-selling duo who frequented his neighbourhood and who he suspects, only suspects, might be in that college town because of some tenuous connections, and; participates in some complex surgical operations upon the male genitals of the aforementioned husband along with a quack! Again, all this could have been genuinely funny, but Chatterjee's attempts at making this simultaneously profound make it all feel completely ridiculous and distasteful. I could go on with a zillion examples, but in the interests of brevity, am going to cut short and hope that you get my general drift.

Overall, I would strongly suggest avoiding this book. I have already tested it with a number of people, and thus far, I can lay claim to being the only one to actually complete it! Even if you succeed where the others failed, I would be very surprised if you would be the happier for it.

Sadly, Upamanyu's novels have dropped in quality after his first, iconic, English August, like the caption. EA was based on his own experiences, and touched many chords. Upamanyu clearly belongs to that genre of one-time novelists who, after their own experiences are exhausted with their first novel, then lack the imagination to invent further compelling situations for their subsequent trash.