‘Lorenzo Searches for the Meaning of Life’ by Upamanyu Chatterjee: The curious case of Padre Lorenzo

Maninder Sidhu

Upamanyu Chatterjee’s new novel, ‘Lorenzo Searches for the Meaning of Life’, is a spiritual bonanza that spreads across cultures, countries and continents. It comes across as an engaging mix of fictional biography, the popular spiritual genre, and roman-e-clef, and hence a flavourful spread on a sacred plank. Based on the life of a friend, Fabrizio Senesi, it is, as Chatterjee characteristically puts it, ‘like many true stories, a work of fiction’.

It opens with the road accident of 19-year-old Lorenzo Senesi in 1977, causing a forearm injury. Previously skilled in fine arts and baking, the hospital experience draws Lorenzo towards an advanced course in physiotherapy. The vagaries of the protagonist, beginning with local catechism classes, Monday prayer meetings, a decade at Praglia Abbey monastery, service at the Benedictine ashram in Phulbari Para (Bangladesh), the physiotherapy clinic at Satkhira, and beyond, seem an outcome of his fluid, evolving spirituality.

One cannot help but notice that what the memoir ‘Eat Pray Love’ meant to Elizabeth Gilbert, ‘Lorenzo’ means to Chatterjee. If the former embarks on a journey of search to Italy and the East after a bitter divorce, the latter follows the travails of his subject and friend to similar terrains, seeking the depths of spiritual traditions post retirement from civil service. Captivating rural anecdotes related to riding the countryside on a motorbike, local folk treatment of bed sores with papaya milk, milking the cow on one’s haunches, shifting from toilet paper to water, bring to mind several overlaps between the two.

The chapters based on the hoary monasteries in Italy are oddly the most gripping. The fascinating descriptions of the Benedictine order and its enduring routine of ora et labora (prayers — matins, lauds, terce, sext, none vespers, compline, labour — apiary, vineyards, library, laundry, infirmary, etc), and the tension generated between hermit and coenobite ways of life evince Chatterjee’s masterful handling of the cultural and linguistic aspects of Padua and Trieste. The near-Gothic locale lends intensity to the subtle arguments underlying the text about ethical commitments and discovery of the self in the current complicated scenario. Early on, Lorenzo’s mentor at the parish pointedly quotes from Dostoyevsky: ‘A monastic is not a special sort of a guy. He is simply what every person ought to be.’

Alongside Lorenzo’s struggles, snippets of news and reflections on the Bible, Benedictine Rule, Carlo Carretto, even a sliver of the Heideggerian discourse, add nuance to the narrative. On the other hand, Lorenzo’s love story gets the weary, tail-end pen; the subdued, matter-of-fact description is nothing to write home about, least of all giving up of holy vows by a dynamic monk.

Interestingly, the quintessential wry humour is sharpened by the implicit gravity of existential questions. Chatterjee tickles the funny bone when least expected. Sample this. On hearing the news of Lorenzo’s permanent entry to Bendictine brotherhood, his mother responds, ‘At least you are getting somewhere, even if it is further away from home.’ Similarly, the sibling alchemy between Paola and Lorenzo is cross and affectionate without melodrama. The Italian and Bangla cultural idiosyncrasies get the gentle ironic treatment, so does the icy mannerism of the bureaucracy.

A labour of love, ‘Lorenzo’ is certainly an inspirational addition to Chatterjee’s oeuvre; more so for being tacitly disruptive by portraying a lived experience of overt spirituality in the reverse, ‘anticlockwise’, direction. Another film in the offing?