Review: The Remains of the Body by Saikat Majumdar
In his latest novel, Saikat Majumdar marries exquisite prose with the intriguing subject of desire that transcends the person of the beloved
Saikat Majumdar is a novelist of forbidden passions. And sometimes of the violence associated with them. While he is increasingly labelled as a novelist of (queer) desire, the passions in Majumdar’s novels are multifarious and go beyond sexual desire too. Hitherto, my favourite Majumdar novel was Firebird (Hachette, 2015), with its child protagonist Ori who comes to hate the stage with a blinding rage, leading him to arson. The novel had appealed for its sheer force of character in its main protagonist, also exposing us to the potential for evil in childhood.
Majumdar’s next novel, The Scent of God (2019), was about boyhood too, an intimate friendship between boys with homoerotic undertones, set in a spiritual mission school. His prime characters seemed to have grown up by Majumdar’s subsequent work of fiction, The Middle Finger (2022), which explored personal relations in a university setting. It was here, that Majumdar’s experiments with language and an intricate poetics to represent passion came to the fore with the protagonist, Megha. Megha moves from American academia to a new private university in Delhi, (much like Majumdar’s own move from Stanford to Ashoka), and is a poet of the uncanny, of lizard imagery seeping into exploring the (queer) desire threatening to burst out from the very cuticles of her skin.
But it is with his latest offering, The Remains of the Body, that Majumdar manages to find exquisite prose to marry his intriguing subject. Possible bisexuality, but also desire that transcends the body and the person of the beloved to create a strange, at times disembodied ménage à trois, is represented through fluid prose. Here thought and speech merge into one continuum of flowing prose yet remain distinct enough for the reader to know the difference. Desire, that works even through transference, that is fluid, ephemeral, but always present, is portrayed with a suppleness of language that draws admiration and gives pleasure to the reader. The pleasure is thence both a dive exploring the forbidden but also rejoicing over the taste of language.
The main protagonists are Kaustav, a postdoctoral fellow in anthropology in Canada, and the married couple Avik and Sunetra who live in California. Avik is a corporate honcho, while Sunetra was pushed into a lab technician’s job, we learn duly, even though she had academic aspirations. Ostensibly, the diasporic setting in North America reverses Majumdar’s previous novel’s migration from America to India, and also moves from lesbian love to male bisexuality. More importantly, it seems to transcend the body while working through the body, examining the crucial question of what remains of the body in another after touch, and can that be accessed by another. I leave this here, not to give more spoilers, and let the reader enjoy this delicious metaphysical examination of heterogenous desire upon their own reading of the novel.
The prose is completely at ease with this pliancy of queer desire, of accessing a body through its contact with the other, of passions that mould themselves into unconventional, almost indefinable shapes, and articulations of emotions that are accessed by some character more than others. Visibly, one stylistic innovation is the dropping of inverted commas for speech and dialogue, like Sally Rooney does. Some of the dialogues are good examples of diegesis and mimesis, active speech and reflection being merged, without the explicit use of quotation marks. Many lines are also delivered with a novel verve, flexibility, and deep insight on personal relationships. Consider these ruminations on the marriage depicted in the novel: [love] was true and it was there, soft and loyal under a hard crust — but slowly it had started to rot. It was a ferment of marriage, the toll of just nine years that made it fertile within while raising a bad odour.
Or, admire the simple play and profundity in “Life [that] was shit verse.”
Majumdar’s latest novel has an elusive beauty to it that is not easily pinned down and certainly can’t be communicated in a short review. It is — like its subject of love, passion, and desire — constructive and destructive; “forms etched in water” — as Majumdar claims of people at the novel’s conclusion. A “Shapeless, slippery form” we should be “stupid enough to love.”
Maaz Bin Bilal is an author and translator and teaches at Jindal Global University.