Customer Reviews

Not Where I Started From

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The stories--Not Where I Started From, by Kate Wheeler, are strange and modern. They take place all over the world, where the author has been and has detailed knowledge: India, Burma, Thailand, France, New York, Buenos Aires, and one in the south somewhere. I was impressed by the colorful and poetic use of language: "Miss Bi Chin's water heart flows in uncontrollable sympathy toward the monk." "Inside my body, anticipation's orchestra tuned up: deep thrills on cellos, reedy squeaks." "I lay back and watched the live oaks slip past, their crowns like lung shadows on the X-ray sky." He used her first name "as he'd used mine, like an unpleasant forefinger pointing at her heart. Or at her ego, to be precise and fair." "By the time I heard his tale, it had been retold so many times that it had flattened into myth, the verbal equivalent of a mural on an Egyptian tomb." "Squiggly rays go from holy man to Edward." "He didn't touch me, just wiped his heavy wingtips on the loon's head mat, his eyes moving from side to side like peeled eggs in a jar of oil." But these are troubling stories of women at loose ends, striving to find faith in weird religious practices with odd men, or bonding with inappropriate women, or having numberless affairs that leave them baffled and unfulfilled. None of them have satisfactory relationships with their parents, some are runaways, some throw away promising careers for the slightest of reasons. The author, ordained in Burma as a Buddhist nun according to the cover blurb, knows whereof she speaks when she writes sarcastically of the east, but one wonders why her characters have allowed themselves to get into the fixes they have. Though they emerge changed in almost every story, the reader finds it hard to sympathize with them. Still, the book is a great read

I stumbled on this book and bought it because of the title, never imagining that it would be so entertaining, full of the intrigue of spiritual inquiry gone slightly haywire. It is a series of short stories dealing with the oddities surrounding various young people bent on finding enlightenment but who also find peculiar twists and turns in their quest. Not always complimentary to the messianic guru types, either.

Read it!

This is one of my favorite books. Glad to see she finally has another one out.