Hard Travel to Sacred Places

Hard Travel to Sacred Places is the record of a personal odyssey through Southeast Asia, an external and internal journey through grief and the painful realities of a decadent age. Wurlitzer - novelist, screenwriter, and Buddhist practitioner - travels with his wife, photographer Lynn Davis, on a photo assignment to the sacred sites of Thailand, Burma, and Cambodia. Heavy Westernization, sex clubs, aging hippies and expatriates, and political dissidents provide a vivid contrast to the peace that Wurlitzer and Davis seek, still reeling from the death of their son in a car accident. As Davis with her camera searches for a thread of meaning among the artifacts and relics of a more enlightened age, Wurlitzer grasps at the wisdom of the Buddhist teachings in an effort to assuage his grief. His journal chronicles the survival of age-old truths in a world gone mad.

After the untimely death of their 21-year-old son, novelist/screenwriter Wurlitzer ( Little Buddha ) and his wife, photogapher Lynn Davis, embarked on a spiritual journey through Thailand, Burma (now Myanmar) and Cambodia, seeking solace and enlightenment from Buddhist sacred places. They found instead a consumer culture in which material desire has displaced the spiritual center with disastrous consequences for the indigenous practice of Buddhism. By the end of their journey, Wurlitzer and Davis have failed to find the illumination and peace they had so desperately sought. Unfortunately, readers will gain as little from this book as the authors did from their trip, for Wurlitzer's style is pretentious, and his questions, for one who claims to have practiced Buddhism, are sophomoric and self-conscious. Had he remembered that in Buddhism enlightenment comes only after one has forsaken all desire, he might have been able to transcend the physical and spiritual exhaustion that dominated his journey. Since he did not however, his readers are left likewise exhausted and without enlightenment.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A Southeast Asia travelogue that looks for spiritual sustenance but instead finds distraction in spiritual tourism and lengthy quotation. Accompanied by his wife, photographer Lynn Davis, Wurlitzer (Slow Fade, 1984, and author of the screenplay for Bertolucci's film Little Buddha) takes the reader, in maddeningly desultory fashion, to Thailand, Burma (now known as Myanmar), and Cambodia. The motive for the trip is to mourn the accidental death of Davis's 21-year-old son. Wurlitzer desperately wants to convey the course of an inner, rather than an outer, journey--but he fails. Apparently believing that all quotations are equally self- explanatory and useful, he jump-cuts his narrative with anything he comes across: from a Buddhist quote to a newspaper account of a Buddhist monk ``caught having sex with a female corpse in a coffin at a Samut Prakan Temple'' in Bangkok. It takes a while for Wurlitzer to realize that their spiritual journey has been a failure. ``We seem to be locked into movement for its own sake, as if by constantly changing the outside we will in some way encourage a realization within of the truth of impermanence.'' The same, sadly, might be said for the reader, who has had to wade through descriptions of this couple's trek through capitalist Thailand, particularly Patpong (the sex district); a Thai princess's birthday party; a shorthand account of politics in Burma; and visits to many of the famous Buddhist temples, including Cambodia's Angkor Wat. But by the end, the two travelers are physically weakened and not spiritually strengthened. The only thing ``hard'' about this travel might be that they felt they had to undergo it at all. A disjointed pastiche of Buddhist touchstones, Southeast Asian politics and temple lore, and personal expressions of grief. Go elsewhere for all four. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Wurlitzer, the screenwriter for Bertolucci's Little Buddha, offers a fragmented narrative of a multipurpose fling through Thailand, Myanmar (Burma), and Cambodia. The author and his wife, a photographer on assignment, were mourning the death of his stepson (her son), exploring film projects, seeking spiritual soothing by visiting such sites as Tham Krabok and Angkor Wat, reporting on the sex shows of Bangkok, and apparently writing this book to pay for it all. The text is heavily larded with quotes on Buddhism and newspaper clippings of current events. Wurlitzer's contribution details the couple's fevers and aches-and inoperative hotel plumbing. The result is a superficial view of the area. Many good books are being published on this region and what its cultures can mean to us, for example, Sue Downie's Down Highway One (Allen & Unwin, 1993) and Stan Sesser's The Lands of Charm and Cruelty (LJ 5/1/93). This isn't one of them.
Harold M. Otness, Southern Oregon State Coll. Lib., Ashland
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.