Book Excerpt: Lorenzo Searches for the Meaning of Life by Upamanyu Chatterjee

Read an exclusive excerpt from Upamanyu Chatterjee’s Lorenzo Searches for the Meaning of Life (Published by Speaking Tiger, 2024)

Three years ago in the May of 1977, on the 6th at six in the morning, Lorenzo, in a rush to reach the bakery on via Giosue Carducci—where he had begun work some eight months previously—had been shooting down via D’Annunzio on his two-wheeler, a Vespa Piaggio Primavera. A Fiat 850 Sports Coupè had at the same time been hurtling down via Conti. Everyone zooms at that hour of the morning. Many also jump a traffic light or two. Two is not necessary if one wants to kill someone. Lorenzo did not slow down at the intersection because the light was red not for him but for the Fiat. At sixty kilometres an hour, the Vespa hit the coupè almost dead-centre in its side and like a circus acrobat, Lorenzo, helmet-less of course, somersaulted clean over the car. At least, that is how everybody—the principal players, sleuths, busybodies—reconstructed the sequence of events because when he came to—a mere twenty seconds after—he found himself flat on his back, gazing up at a rose-tinted sky, on the other side of the Fiat.

He remembers distinctly—even years after such an incident, how can one forget?—lying there at peace on the road and after an age (a minute? Two?), cautiously beginning, one by one, to check his reflexes. Eyeballs? Neck? Could he move his neck? Yes. Toes? Draw his right knee up a bit? Left? Good. Was the spine then okay? More or less? More? Or less? And then the terrible, burning pain in his left forearm, a sort of dangling nervelessness that pulsed its torment, began to insist on drawing all his attention to itself.

A miracle. That is what he heard most often during the month that he spent in bed in the Hospital Maggiore in central Trieste. The Public Health system in the late seventies tended to be slow and sure, so surgery took place a leisurely two weeks after admission and then post-operative care required that he spend another fortnight in the ward. A miracle. They all—doctors, nurses, visitors, family, neighbours friends from his prayer group—shook their heads in wonder and said, ‘Without a helmet, you hit a car at sixty kilometres an hour, you cartwheel clean over it, you land on your back and all you break is your forearm. It boggles the mind.’

So he stayed in bed for a month and thought about things with his boggled mind. Where he had come from, where he was going and how to find out more about where he ought to go.

When he gets bored of holding his arm against the heater, he turns to unpack his bag. His few clothes he puts away neatly in the wardrobe and his two books on the table—his Carlo Carretto and his personal copy of the Rule of Saint Benedict—look as though they have always belonged in that room.

Excerpted with permission from author Upamanyu Chatterjee and Speaking Tiger Books, the publisher of Lorenzo Searches for the Meaning of Life. (2024)

About the Author

Upamanyu Chatterjee is the author of English, August: An Indian Story (1988), The Last Burden (1993), The Mammaries of the Welfare State (2000), Weight Loss (2006), Way to Go (2011), Fairy Tales at Fifty (2014), and Villainy (2022)—all novels; The Revenge of the Nonvegetarian (2018), a novella; and The Assassination of Indira Gandhi (2019) , a collection of long stories.

In 2000, he won the Sahitya Akademi Award, and in 2008, he was awarded the Order of Officier des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government for his contribution to literature.

About the Book

One summer morning in 1977, nineteen-year-old Lorenzo Senesi of Aquilina, Italy, drives his Vespa motorscooter 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.