Customer Reviews

Climbing Chamundi Hill: 1001 Steps with a Storyteller and a Reluctant Pilgrim

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Reading this book was like reading no other I book I have ever read-you need to really think as you read, expand your mind and way of seeing the world. It is very rewarding and I recommend it to people who like a challenge, who like to change their way of thinking, who like to think philosophically and deeply.

Climbing Chamundi Hill consists of two interlaced parts: a delightful collection of Indian folk- and fairy tales (or at least folk-like and fairy-like tales--their sources are never given), and a set of commentaries upon them that seems intended to lay out some kind of meditation-based spiritual progression. That is to say, while the tales themselves are discrete and self-contained, the interpretations are intended to form something more unified and coherent, if oblique. Both the stories and the interpretations are delivered by a retired librarian and Shiva devotee who accompanies the the book's narrator, a recovering invalid in search of wholesome exercise, as well as kind of tourist, kind of seeker/pilgrim, on a dayhike to a temple to Shiva.

The stories and their commentaries form together both a postmodern novel (a la Pale Fire) and a sort of Eastern Wisdom compendium. The interpretations themselves seem to push, at the end, towards fusion of postmodern anti-foundationalism and something more specifically Hindu which I, in my ignorance of those traditions, can't identify. And, in general, the problem with the book is that to those of us on the outside of these traditions, the spiritual interpretations of the tales don't really gel. I can make out individual points along the way that seem familiar enough--learning to avoid binary thinking, for example, itself something of a postmodern chestnut--but I don't get enough to be able to connect them up into anything resembling a model of spiritual progression.

Still, if the commentary is primarily for adepts, the stories are more than enough for the rest of us.

"Unputdownable" :-)
If you are jaded by religious/philosophical literature, this book will refresh you.
If you are not interested in religion at all, you will find Climbing Chamundi Hill incredibly entertaining.

Mr. Glucklich, when is the next one coming?