Turtle Feet: The Making and Unmaking of a Buddhist Monk - Softcover

Grozni, Nikolai

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1594483760 ISBN 13: 9781594483769

Publisher: Riverhead Books, 2009

Synopsis

A brilliantly colorful memoir of becoming a monk and a young man's spiritual journey in India.

Nikolai Grozni, a Boston jazz piano prodigy struck by spiritual ennui, suddenly abandoned 15 years of music studies to seek out the Dalai Lama's university in India, where he began his quest for the ultimate truth. Instead of finding answers, Grozni fell in with an unusual cast of characters, and struggled with Buddhist logic and with the many small challenges to life as a monk in a community of Tibetan refugees. Turtle Feet is his bittersweet and funny memoir about the search for higher power, and the discovery of oneself amidst teeming, chaotic, and glorious humanity.

About this title

About the Author:

Nikolai Grozni was born in Sofia, Bulgaria, and educated in the United States and India. In previous incarnations, he has been a piano prodigy, jazz musician, and Buddhist monk. The author of three novels published in Bulgaria, Grozni holds an MFA from Brown University. He is married to the writer Danielle Trussoni. Turtle Feet is his first book of nonfiction.

From Publishers Weekly:

This book about Tibetan monkhood certainly fits the description of the "extreme" memoir. Written by a Bulgarian novelist who was educated in the United States (Brown University) and India (down the street from the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala), this book takes a long time to get good, but it does get there. The most fascinating character is not the narrator, an archetypal youthful apprentice figure. That honor is reserved for a fallen, stateless monk from Bosnia who is a Zorba figure, enticing the narrator not to lusty appreciation of the world's wonders but to what Buddhists call seeing things as they are?enlightenment that is ultimately no big deal. There are passages of beauty about the nature of the mind and existence that few books about Buddhism can rival, because few books about Buddhism are written by authors with creative training. But a good editor should have reined in the author's disproportionate focus on the main character's excesses; it would have helped pacing and made a shorter and more convincing read.

About this edition

• Publisher: Riverhead Books
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1594483760
• ISBN 13: 9781594483769
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352