2023 read #67: The Devourers by Indra Das.

The Devourers by Indra Das

307 pages

Published 2015

Read from June 14 to June 15

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

I read about two-thirds of this book on a plane to Las Vegas back in February 2020. Even then I felt uneasy around so many people, pooling and flowing their way around a claustrophobic world, sharing suspect exhalations. I didn’t know then that it would be the last time I would fly (whether forever or merely for some years, I don’t know even now). I didn’t know yet that the world I conceptualized around me would end. The book was a spell, a disorienting swirl of senses and violence and depths of time, read in the dark, suspended in clouds. When I got home, I wouldn’t finish it. Soon everything around me would halt, break apart.

Perhaps it’s easy to understand my reluctance to return to The Devourers. Indrapramit Das’ prose is sharpened to the edge of delirium, beguiling and sinister, fermenting with all the violence and rot of history, pulling you aside from the world into a parallel space of blood-spiced myths and hot breath on the back of your neck. It is a horrifying revelry, revolting, ravenous, seductive, predatory. But even now the book feels charged with the atmosphere of that first liminal unease, that last layover before the end of the world. I've wanted to come back, to start over, to finish it at last. But the book itself seems to have become a mythical artifact for me, weighted with associations. It hasn't been easy to make myself pick it up again.

I’m glad I finally read The Devourers in full. It most reminds me of Jordy Rosenberg’s exquisite Confessions of the Fox. The two books are far apart in tone and subject, but both are queer-centered deconstructions of historical atrocities, both told through the framing device of a scholar transcribing and annotating historical documents that reveal a hidden side to the world. Clearly this is a micro-genre that deeply appeals to my particular tastes. And I love a book or story where the title changes meaning by the end. That said, however—

[Content warning: discussion of fictional SA.]

I can’t review this book without mentioning my discomfort with sexual assault and forced pregnancy being major plot points. Even in the context of a novel thematically centered on the horrors of predatory masculinity, colonialism, and generational trauma, it feels questionable. Das handles these themes far better than, say, George R. R. Martin ever did, but inevitably there are some lines that don’t sit right with me (such as when we’re introduced to Cyrah’s perspective: she’s writing to her son and muses “I should have left… but then I wouldn’t be writing this for you, and should I regret that? I don’t know”). That particular line, and its sentiments, becomes much more complex and recontextualized by the end of the book, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that Cyrah is pressured to go on with the pregnancy for purely narrative purposes.