A touching, if sometimes meandering, account of a half century of brotherly love.
A memoir recounts a friendship’s depth and intimacy, inspired by a Herman Hesse novel.
Even when Frode (One Times One & Other Numinous Stories of Redemption and Loss, 2015, etc.) was a young boy, he was drawn to the meditative refuge provided by silence. It became obvious to others by the time he was a teenager that he was destined for a religious vocation. Frode was ready to become a monk by age 17, after his high school graduation. He was still too young, though, and took philosophy classes at a local college while spending his time off at a Trappist monastery in Northern California. There he met Brother Paul Williams, who became his closest male friend. Their kinship was profoundly spiritual as well as intellectual. They were fellow travelers on the winding path to transcendence: “Yet here was a man who was looking for the same elusive thing as I was—how to best live on the deepest levels of life.” Frode eventually decided to leave the monastery, and thoughtfully chronicles his adventures, which include two wives, parenthood, and no shortage of erotic experimentation. In some respects, the book is a tribute to the author’s mentors, and he lovingly discusses two professors whose influence remains indelible, and Doctor David, a healer and close confidant. This is also a philosophical autobiography that charts the arc of Frode’s development; like one of his idols, Thomas Merton, he read widely and was magnetized to Eastern spiritual writings. Still, the recollection’s centerpiece is Frode’s connection to Brother Paul; the author uses Hesse’s Narcissus and Goldmund as a literary key to understanding their mutual affection. Frode begins each chapter with an excerpt from that book, juxtaposed with one from his correspondence with Brother Paul. This is a strikingly candid memoir, and the author’s account of Brother Paul’s death—Frode was at his side when he took his last breath—is poignant. It’s never clear why the author left the monastery—he chalks up the impulse to an “inner voice” beckoning him to the beyond, but this is strangely trite for an otherwise searching examination. In addition, Frode’s writing style strongly favors the verbose and grandiloquent—paragraph-long sentences are bursting at the seams with gratuitous adjectives. But this remains an emotionally moving homage to a beautiful friendship, a peculiarly cerebral love letter.
A touching, if sometimes meandering, account of a half century of brotherly love.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-365-33900-4
Page Count: 162
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
An erudite and artful, though frustratingly restrained, look at Old Testament stories.
The Book of Genesis as imagined by a veteran voice of underground comics.
R. Crumb’s pass at the opening chapters of the Bible isn’t nearly the act of heresy the comic artist’s reputation might suggest. In fact, the creator of Fritz the Cat and Mr. Natural is fastidiously respectful. Crumb took pains to preserve every word of Genesis—drawing from numerous source texts, but mainly Robert Alter’s translation, The Five Books of Moses (2004)—and he clearly did his homework on the clothing, shelter and landscapes that surrounded Noah, Abraham and Isaac. This dedication to faithful representation makes the book, as Crumb writes in his introduction, a “straight illustration job, with no intention to ridicule or make visual jokes.” But his efforts are in their own way irreverent, and Crumb feels no particular need to deify even the most divine characters. God Himself is not much taller than Adam and Eve, and instead of omnisciently imparting orders and judgment He stands beside them in Eden, speaking to them directly. Jacob wrestles not with an angel, as is so often depicted in paintings, but with a man who looks not much different from himself. The women are uniformly Crumbian, voluptuous Earth goddesses who are both sexualized and strong-willed. (The endnotes offer a close study of the kinds of power women wielded in Genesis.) The downside of fitting all the text in is that many pages are packed tight with small panels, and too rarely—as with the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah—does Crumb expand his lens and treat signature events dramatically. Even the Flood is fairly restrained, though the exodus of the animals from the Ark is beautifully detailed. The author’s respect for Genesis is admirable, but it may leave readers wishing he had taken a few more chances with his interpretation, as when he draws the serpent in the Garden of Eden as a provocative half-man/half-lizard. On the whole, though, the book is largely a tribute to Crumb’s immense talents as a draftsman and stubborn adherence to the script.
An erudite and artful, though frustratingly restrained, look at Old Testament stories.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-393-06102-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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