During his train journey to Trieste to visit his family before leaving Italy for London, and eventually for Bangladesh, Lorenzo Sensei was hit with a realisation―the introspective silence of a monastery life had an infinite virtue, but he wondered, “Is it correct to stay away from this madness, from human beings butchering and blowing one another up in every corner of the globe; could one ever escape the insanity, saying that it is none of my business?”
It was during the train journey that readers see, for the first time, Lorenzo transforming in Upamanyu Chatterjee’s Lorenzo Searches for the Meaning of Life, after spending eight years as a disciplined Benedictine monk in Italy’s Praglia Abbey monastery. He had hoped to find the purpose of his life there, away from his family and the endless “striddle and babble” of everyday existence.
Loosely biographical, the novel follows the story of a young Lorenzo, who meets with a road accident in the last year of his teenage life. He then experiences a profound existential crisis and turns to religion for answers before gradually realising that he didn’t necessarily have to lead a monastic life to attain spiritual fulfilment. Before that realisation hit him, Lorenzo believed that the pursuit of purpose meant shedding the comforts of ordinary existence. Family, too, became collateral in his quest. When his parents accused him of selfishly abandoning his responsibilities as an ideal Catholic family man, he remained undeterred.
Chatterjee believes that humans tend to believe that nothing valuable could be easily won in life. “I suppose that the reason why spiritual path is always considered a difficult path to walk is because you have to get rid of a lot of misconceptions,” he tells THE WEEK at Taj Bengal on the sidelines of the recent Coal India Kolkata Literary Meet 2025. “It is also psychologically true that we must feel that we have made some efforts to gain something valuable. If we get it far too easily then we begin to think, ‘Oh maybe it was not worth it’. There are people who decide that’s worth it. Then there are people who get what they are looking for and then realise, ‘That’s not what I wanted’. That, too, is a possibility as offered to Lorenzo by one of his gurus. To each his own.” That last phrase often finds mention in our conversation.
For Chatterjee, Lorenzo Searches for the Meaning of Life is a tale of a fascinating person who decided to be a monk at the age of 21, moved to Bangladesh from Italy and spoke fluent Bangla. “It is about a person who seemed to have led a very interesting life and who became a good friend,” says the retired civil servant.
The book was born when Chatterjee serendipitously crossed paths with Fabrizio Sensei and his wife Pushpa, a Bangladeshi Bengali, during his stay in Colombo between 2018 and 2024. “I was in an elevator when I saw this white man speaking in Bengali of East Bengal with a subcontinental woman. I thought it was getting weird,” the St Stephen’s College graduate tells the audience at the Kolkata literary meet.
Later, Chatterjee was introduced to the couple by his wife, who told him that the white man was looking for someone to write a book about his life. Thus, it happened in the Sri Lankan capital―not bound by the sacred silence any more, Fabrizio, who has lived his life “anti-clockwise”, talked; Chatterjee, with his fountain pen, took notes.
But could Chatterjee ignore the fact that readers saw Lorenzo as more than just a person who led an interesting life? What truly captivated them―and propelled the book to success and won him a JCB Prize for Literature―was Lorenzo’s unconventional spiritual journey, albeit in reverse, as the author says in the book. In today’s publishing landscape where spirituality is a “bestseller”, perhaps Lorenzo Searches for the Meaning of Life with its unconventional take on spirituality was a timely release.
Unlike the endless stream of self-help books and 101 ways to make life better or the so-called gurus with their wisdom of Solomon promising enlightenment, Chatterjee highlighted the banality of the religious, spiritual path while often taking satirical digs at it and bringing into storytelling his usual wry sense of humour.
Lorenzo’s journey, though, is anything but banal, argues Chatterjee. “What the book makes clear is that Lorenzo realises that the monastic life is perhaps not for him,” he says, making clear that he would ask the publishers to remove the word ‘banal’ from the book’s cover. “I don’t think the book is a reflection on the banality of his religious experience.”
Chatterjee, however, acknowledges that many of today’s bestselling spiritual books often serve a convenient shortcut to religious beliefs, offering quick-fixes rather than deeper introspection. “That kind of thing attracts. And that’s fine. To each his own. But real spiritual or religious search is much more profound and much more deep and more disturbing,” says Chatterjee, who is fluent in several languages. “To be able to read the spiritual text correctly, one must first read a lot of secular literature.”
The author makes it abundantly clear that his is not a book with any kind of message. “I did not write the book because I became spiritual or something,” he says, adding that he is not much of a spiritual person but likes the discipline of writing. Faith, in his view, is deeply personal, a conviction held with strength but not beyond question. One must always remain open to the possibility of being proven wrong in one’s faith, much like Fabrizio himself.
Chatterjee recalls how Fabrizio, who once dismissed fiction as a futile exercise, found himself most moved by a line from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, “For monks are not a special sort of men, but only what all men ought to be,” while reading his draft. The irony was perhaps not lost on the author. “That is what he realised, that he could continue to be internally a monk and yet be a part of the world,” he says.
Chatterjee, meanwhile, hopes to follow the right path with the ethics and morality ingrained in him. “It is perfectly possible to lead an upright, ethical and moral life without following the external symbols of religion,” he says. “But again [it depends] on person to person.”
LORENZO SEARCHES FOR THE MEANING OF LIFE
By Upamanyu Chatterjee
Published by Speaking Tiger
Pages 304; price Rs699