All Flesh by Ananda Devi, translated from French by Jeffrey Zuckerman, is a satire that ultimately has its message overshadowed by the representation of fatness in the novel. Our unnamed narrator of the book was born already comically large. Her mother fled from her child’s unending hunger. Her father sees her not as one person, but as two, believing she ate her twin in the womb and spoils her, believing that now he’s responsible for feeding not one but two children.
Our narrator sees that she is reduced by the eyes that gaze at her. Since her birth as a “pink elephant,” she has done nothing but crave and devour. She is born at 22 pounds and 28 inches, the same weight as some of the heaviest babies ever recorded.
From the start, it seems that this exaggeration may be part and parcel of what Devi is attempting to do. The narrator sees herself as an amplified monster of fatness, an exaggeration that seems like a reflection of what society wants her to see. She is “too heavy to bear,” a “gelatinous mass,” a “lardass,” “dying of [her] own body.” The character goes through what, for some fat readers, are familiar humiliation rituals. Being endlessly bullied until she no longer wants to go to school. Being asked to buy two seats on the plane. Worrying that chairs or floors will break beneath her. This near-one-dimensionality, this reduction to a body, is expected from the satire Devi’s novel claims to be.
But a satire requires a turn. The exaggeration, the irony, are meant to turn the readers onto themselves, make them look in a mirror, make them ask uncomfortable questions. The book does turn, but not in the way readers might expect. It turns towards social media, overindulgence, overconsumption, and our love of excess. It makes a damning point about what we are willing to consume, how we visualize ourselves in the age of social media, and what cruelties the ruthless gaze of the internet can inflict. About parents, too, who either abandon or coddle children they chose to bring into “the world that they couldn’t save,” a world doomed to eat itself to death.
The metaphor makes sense, certainly. We are gobbling up resources, forcing more and more fast fashion and Labubus down our own throats, letting our own food, energy, and water sources be gulped down. “We’re gluttons, all of us; always starving,” Devi writes. The narrator says that if humanity was meant to survive, we would have adapted by now, but instead: “We aspire to laziness. Our inventions keep on making us less active… I’m the outcome, the predestined, morbid end of this long process.” She is “a warning to the species: this is what may become of you… I am your future. I am your tomorrow.”
And isn’t that terrifying?
Except that Devi’s desire to make her point ignores the one-dimensional creature she has both created and now trampled with both feet. The fat body becomes collateral damage, an object to be used purely as a symbol of ugly, endless consumerism and waste. The one-dimensionality of our protagonist, her focus only on growing bigger, consuming more, the level at which readers must dig into detailed visuals of fat folds and hulk, serves to other the protagonist and fat people like her. The fat body is merely a tool chosen to stand in for sickening desire and foul consumption. What, then, is fatness? What do real-life fat people treasure, want, love? According to All Flesh, very little (and also way too much).
Devi spends more than 100 pages forcing readers to wallow in a one-note misery of endless bloat and sweat, of humiliation and body horror, but those details of fatness exist only to be used. The humiliating, long, dreadful scene of her getting stuck in a door, it turns out, has very little to do with creating empathy for fatness or turning a sharp eye on the way we treat fat or different bodies in our culture. Instead, it was all a metaphor, a symbol, something to point somewhere else. Which leaves our narrator stuck, trapped, in those moments of utter humiliation; at her most seemingly redemptive, having sex and being photographed by the much older carpenter who freed her from the doorway. The people who love her, such as her father, are cast as absurd, doing so only because of their lack of understanding.
One of the key errors Devi commits is a common one: a distinct lack of understanding and imagination of the fat body. At one point we are told our narrator wears a size 4XL; this would make her a size 26 or 28 in US women’s sizes. Big, but nothing close to the weight Devi is describing. Our narrator says at one point that a doctor warned her not to put all her weight on any of her limbs, or she would risk her bones shattering. She regularly worries that the floor will break beneath her weight. Her organs “cave in under the weight of all the fat around them.” This weight that is depicted as unimaginable is unimaginable largely because Devi is unclear on what being morbidly obese would actually feel or look like. Teenagers at this weight exist. What are their lives like? In an age where we have revealing, bold, honest stories about fatness and disordered eating, this stereotyped, monstrous depiction of fatness borders on crude.
While it’s not Devi’s primary point to comment on fatness, it’s worthwhile to question whether obtaining the mountaintop of satire is worth trampling a marginalized and ostracized community beneath the feet of the novel. As consumers of media, many of us have been asking for a long time: when does something become gratuitous? When does the depiction of violence or abuse rise above its use case and become unnecessary? Fatphobia has a rich and awful history rooted in racism and misogyny, with devastating consequences for many. While there is certainly a platform for satirizing our overconsumption, I hope that future writers will take more care about what symbols they are using, and whether their use may cause more harm than their thesis is worth.
FICTION
All Flesh
By Ananda Devi (tr. Jeffrey Zuckerman)
FSG Originals
Published April 28, 2026
