Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Novelist and essayist Iyer (The Half Known Life) shares in this luminous account the lessons that more than 30 years of visiting a Benedectine monastery in California have taught him about silence. Convinced by a friend to visit the retreat in 1991, he describes it as less a place of solitude than a tightly woven "communal web" where silence is not a means of retreating into the self but shedding it to better live in the world. As a result of his visits, Iyer comes to see the ways in which the sacred shows up again and again in the mundane. For example, the tiny Tokyo apartment he shares with his girlfriend and her small children becomes a self-contained paradise ("Now I can see luxury is defined by all you don't have to long for"), while the wildfires that regularly break out in the hills of California--and over the years claim his mother's house and endanger the monastery itself--serve as a reminder that "the sacred is not a sanctuary... its power comes from the fact that it can't begin to be controlled." The author brilliantly illuminates philosophical insights about the nature of the self, the world, and how silence serves as a conduit between the two, often in elegant, evocative prose: at the monastery, "it's as if a lens cap has come off and once the self is gone, the world can come flooding in, in all its wild immediacy." This is stunning. (Jan.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Fans of Iyer (The Half Known Life) will welcome this latest compilation of his reflections on how solitude, contemplation, and a stay at a hermitage can be utilized to help people cope with war, climate change, and other vicissitudes of life. It is, to be sure, thoughtful and inspirational reading. Even so, readers may find themselves feeling impatient with his nearly formulaic delivery of pensées, some only a line or two long without any real narrative. Based in Japan, Iyer writes about lessons he's learned from going on multiple solitary retreats a year. These secluded sessions entail long stretches of silence and are held in a small Benedictine hermitage in Big Sur, CA. Descriptions of his retreat experiences include receiving the news of his daughter's cancer diagnosis and his mother's profound grief over his father's death while Iyer was away from his family. VERDICT A nice addition to the literature on the blessings of quietude. Iyer's observations about people, places, and himself are beautifully written and may offer readers some reassurance about these troubled times.--Ellen Gilbert
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
The noted traveler, journalist, and author turns to an unexpected subject: the monastic life of contemplation and meditation. Iyer takes his title from the great fires that have lately ravaged California, where he has long retreated to a monastery run by Camaldolese monks, "the most contemplative congregation of Benedictines." Contemplative the inhabitants may be, but they are very much people of the world. As he learns from another contemplative, this one a Zen monk in Japan, "Anyone can sit in a Zendo. The trick is to sit in the world." The monks seemingly delight in defying stereotypes and misconceptions. (For one thing, they enjoy watching Monty Python on Sunday nights.) Iyer travels to other monasteries and other religious traditions, but Catholicism and Buddhism, which seem well suited to each other, occupy most of his attention. Some of his time is spent in the company of the gravel-voiced Leonard Cohen, the singer-songwriter who, though dying of cancer, kept busy doing his longtime work as a Buddhist monk in a mountain retreat above Los Angeles. One secret to Zen? "You can't dwell on things." Yet the world of things is always present, even in the transcendental mountains of Big Sur, perched over the roiling Pacific: great fires are burning, and though a Camaldolese brother reports of one that has consumed 130,000 acres, "other than that, all is quiet, and the bell calls us to morning prayers." A lovely complement to the monastic writings of both Thomas Merton and Patrick Leigh Fermor, Iyer's book speaks well to the qualities of those who live both outside and firmly within the daily world and the wisdom, rough and refined, that monks have to offer, as when one advises him, "If you do spot a mountain lion, make sure you don't look like a deer!" Essential reading for anyone interested in the monastic tradition and those who follow it. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
