Weight Loss (novel)
Weight Loss is a 2006 novel by Upamanyu Chatterjee.
 First edition | |
| Author | Upamanyu Chatterjee |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Sarnath Banerjee |
| Country | India |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Black comedy |
| Publisher | Viking Press |
Publication date | 28 February 2006 |
| Media type | Print (Paperback) |
| Pages | 432 pp |
| ISBN | 0-670-05862-9 |
| OCLC | 65401887 |
| Preceded by | The Mammaries of the Welfare State |
Plot summary
Weight Loss is about the strange life (from age 11 to age 37) of a sexual deviant named Bhola, whose attitude to most of the people around him depends on their lust worthiness. Bhola’s tastes are not, to put it mildly, conventional. Sex is a form of depravity for him and he has fetishes about everyone from teachers to roadside sadhus to servants; he progresses from fantasizing about the portly family cook Gopinath to falling “madly in love” with a vegetable vendor and her husband. This last obsession spans the entire length of the book and most of Bhola’s life – he even ends up teaching at a college in an obscure hill-station hundreds of miles from his home because he wants to be near the couple. At various other stages in his life he gets expelled from school for defecating in a teacher’s office, participates in an inexpertly carried out circumcision (one of the book’s many manifestations of the “weight loss” motif).