Let’s ExploreLorenzo Searches for the Meaning of Life

  • Author: Upamanyu Chatterjee
Lorenzo Searches for the Meaning of Life
Lorenzo Searches for the Meaning of Life

One summer morning in 1977, nineteen-year-old Lorenzo Senesi of Aquilina, Italy, drives his Vespa motor-scooter into a speeding Fiat and breaks his forearm.

It keeps him in bed for a month, and his boggled mind thinks of unfamiliar things: Where has he come from? Where is he going? And how to find out more about where he ought to go? When he recovers, he enrols for a course in physiotherapy. He also joins a prayer group, and visits Praglia Abbey, a Benedictine monastery in the foothills outside Padua.

The monastery will become his home for ten years, its isolation and discipline the anchors of his life, and then send him to a Benedictine ashram in faraway Bangladesh-a village in Khulna district, where monsoon clouds as black as night descend right down to river and earth. He will spend many years here. He will pray seven times a day, learn to speak Bengali and wash his clothes in the river, paint a small chapel, start a physiotherapy clinic to ease bodies out of pain, and fall, unexpectedly, in love. And he will find that a life of service to God is enough, but that it is also not enough.

A study of the extraordinary experiences of an ordinary man, a study of both the majesty and the banality of the spiritual path, Upamanyu Chatterjee’s new novel is a quiet triumph. It marks a new phase in the literary journey of one of India’s finest and most consistently original writers.

ABOUT THE AUTHORUpamanyu Chatterjee

Upamanyu Chatterjee was born in 1959 in Patna. He spent over thirty calm and undistinguished years in the Indian Administrative Service; during that time, he wrote six novels—when no one was looking. He retired (early and honourably) in 2016 to devote himself full time to running the household. He has one wife and two daughters. He enjoys several solitary occupations.

Upamanyu Chatterjee

The JCB Prize in Videos

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The JCB Prize for Literature was first awarded in 2018, since then the Prize has been awarded to 6 books.

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Perumal Murugan

Perumal Murugan is an Indian author, scholar, and literary chronicler who writes in Tamil. He has written twelve novels, six collections of short stories, six anthologies of poetry, and many non-fiction books. Ten of his novels have been translated into English: Seasons of the Palm, which was shortlisted for the Kiriyama Prize in 2005, Current Show, One Part Woman, A Lonely Harvest, Trail by Silence, Poonachi or the Story of a Goat, Resolve, Estuary, Rising Heat, and Pyre. He was a professor of Tamil at the Government Arts College in Salem Attur and Namakkal.

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M. Mukundan

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