Where Do We Go From Here? [Hardcover]

Doris Dorrie (Author), John Brownjohn (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 6, 2001

Meet Fred Kaufmann, disillusioned husband of thoroughly competent Claudia and father of surly teenager Franka. His dreams of being a movie director have long ago been shelved for marriage and a child. While Claudia sells her successful vegetarian take-out restaurant to a fast food chain and buys into Buddhism, Fred is trapped in the throes of a classic midlife crisis, made worse when Franka falls madly in love with a young guru. With the hope that brown rice and hardcore meditation will cure Franka's obsession, Fred chaperones his daughter to the meditation center in the South of France. But as a bizarre set of events unfolds, he embarks on a journey of self-discovery that only a special kind of hero can survive. Funny, incisive, and ultimately forgiving, Where Do We Go From Here? is a masterpiece of ironic social comedy from one of Germany's leading writers and filmmakers.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Scathingly funny and surprisingly warm at heart, this midlife-crisis satire by German film writer/director D”rrie (What Do You Want from Me?) skims the surface of contemporary life and comes up with a story rich in comedy and insight. German businessman Fred Kaufmann is a total bastard, and that's an understatement. He's 44, husband to attractive neat-freak Claudia, part-time lover to 25-year-old Spanish teacher Marisol and father to sullen, rebellious teenager Franka. Once he dreamed of becoming a film director, but long ago he joined Claudia in her health-food cafe business. His true occupations, however, are self-regard, self-pity and skirt-chasing. Credit is due the author for somehow making Fred likable, even sympathetic, despite his irksome flaws. An opportunity for enlightenment comes in a roundabout way: Claudia and Franka attend a Buddhist meditation retreat in France, and they return changed women. The latter has found love with a lama and begs her parents to let her go back to live with him. Fred offers to take Franka back to the retreat so he can meet the lama in person and eventually dissuade his daughter from her plans. Thoroughly skeptical of the Buddhist path to enlightenment, Fred surprisingly finds himself cleaving to the seekers at the retreat and doing a bit of seeking himself. Though D”rrie's plot is predictable, it is redeemed by Fred's cynical, humorous narration, and his transformation from a boor into a sentient human being who finally learns manages to put others first from time to time.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Fred Kaufmann is a mediocre mess from Munich. He cheats on his wife, Claudia, who cheats on him right back while immersing herself in Buddhism. His 16-year-old daughter, Franka, barely tolerates him, and he is bored with his job as a successful co-owner (with Claudia) of a coffee and bagel franchise. So it makes perfect sense to take his sorry, out-of-shape 45-year-old self off to France with Franka in tow to deliver her into the loving arms of a Tibetan lama, eight years her senior. On their way to the Buddhist meditation center, they acquire smelly-footed Norbert, a pathetic soul who hitches a ride with the Kaufmanns after his wife and two kids dump him at the bistro where their paths had all crossed. Once at the center, Fred ends up rooming with Norbert and Theo, who is Claudia's lover. Fred has an unpleasant little sexual escapade with Theo's wife while insincerely participating in the ways of Buddha. When his unsurprising, tragedy-laced epiphany about the direction of his life finally occurs, it is so late in the story that the reader is hard-pressed to care. One wishes D rrie (Love, Pain, and the Whole Damn Thing) had used her considerable writing gifts to inject these run-of-the-mill, unsympathetic characters with some substance. A marginal purchase. Beth E. Andersen, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA; 1st Edition edition (July 6, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1582341516
• ISBN-13: 978-1582341514
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,315,589 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An interest in the spiritual., August 17, 2002

By 

algo41 "algo41" (philadelphia, pa United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Where Do We Go From Here? (Hardcover)

The narrator and his wife are having marital problems. He ends up at a Buddhist center in order to "chaperone" his teen age daughter. He grows as a person and she is transformed from surly teenager to mature woman. While the daughter, and a travelling companion picked up along the way, are engaging, the reader just cannot take them seriously. The narrator is sometimes gratuitously unlikable and dull. But... Dorrie does very well in capturing the center experience and its moments of enlightenment and irritation; the book is fairly well plotted and occasionally funny The narrator's wife is rarely "on stage", but is important, and it is interesting how she gradually comes into focus. This book is part literature, part amusement, and worth reading for its interest in the spiritual.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great read, July 23, 2001

By 

"mmoszkowicz" (New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Where Do We Go From Here? (Hardcover)

This is a great read! Doris Dorrie is a great storyteller...funny and unsettling at the same time. She offers weird characters, suspense, tragedy, comedy and wonderful surprise endings.