Saikat Majumdar’s The Remains of the Body explores how friendship, love and desire can overlap without settling into clear labels. In Rituparna Roy’s July 6, 2024 review for Scroll.in, the novel’s triangle of childhood friends Avik and Kaustav and Avik’s partner Sunetra becomes a portrait of divided loyalties, thwarted ambition and a marriage coming apart.
What is The Remains of the Body about?
The novel follows Avik and Kaustav from their youth in Calcutta into adulthood in North America. Their longstanding friendship becomes entangled with Sunetra, Avik’s girlfriend and later wife. Kaustav is attracted to Sunetra, but his feelings for Avik also carry an inarticulate desire that he cannot easily name. The emotional force of the story lies in the way those attachments resist tidy divisions between friendship and romance.
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Roy’s review, published by Scroll.in on July 6, 2024, identifies the novel as Majumdar’s and praises its treatment of bisexuality in Indian English fiction. The review’s image caption names Penguin India; it does not establish further publication or edition details.
How does the novel make desire difficult to categorize?
Kaustav between Avik and Sunetra
Kaustav’s position is not simply a choice between two people. His attraction to Sunetra exists alongside a desire for Avik that remains unnamed, while loyalty to his closest friend pulls against solidarity with Sunetra and her frustrations. Roy reads this uncertainty as central to the novel’s exploration of bisexuality: desire shapes the relationships without being reduced to a single, definitive identity label.
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Friendship as an intimate bond
The triangle makes friendship more than a stable backdrop to romantic relationships. The closeness between the men is emotionally charged, and its boundaries are unsettled by what Kaustav cannot articulate. That ambiguity gives the novel a way to examine how intimacy may be real and consequential even when the people involved cannot define it neatly.
What do ambition and immigrant adulthood add to the story?
The shift from Calcutta to North America places the characters’ private entanglements alongside the lives they build as adults. Avik attains the suburban household and conventional stability associated with a settled life. Sunetra, by contrast, regrets leaving scientific research for corporate work and is unusually clear about her dissatisfaction. Kaustav’s academic career is insecure.
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These differences make the marriage more than a question of attraction or loyalty. Sunetra’s frustration is tied to ambitions set aside and to a life shaped by financial security and marriage. Roy presents her as willing to leave rather than treat dissatisfaction as an inevitable cost of stability.
What does Rituparna Roy praise—and criticize?
Roy’s strongest praise is for the novel’s account of a marriage failing. She writes, “The Remains of the Body is memorable for laying bare, with remarkable precision, the anatomy of a failed marriage.” She also sees the novel’s exploration of bisexuality as a distinctive contribution to Indian English fiction.
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Her reservations concern the experience of reading the final portion: she finds it somewhat repetitive, and the triangle can feel claustrophobic. The eventual separation offers an uneasy release rather than a simple resolution. That mixed judgment matters: emotional intensity is the novel’s subject and strength, but, in Roy’s view, it can also become constricting.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Who is this novel likely to interest?
The Remains of the Body is a strong fit for readers interested in literary fiction about the unstable borders between friendship, love and desire, as well as the pressures that work, marriage and migration place on adult lives. Roy’s review is a useful point of entry for readers who want a critical account of those themes alongside a clear note about the book’s repetitive, claustrophobic stretch near the end.
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