The Scrolls of a Temple Sweeper

Scrolls of a Temple Sweeper is a novel of war, lost children, dream masters, a traveling circus, a theater troupe, a shaman, and a ghostwoman, told by a temple sweeper who has not spoken in twenty-five years. This book is for anyone who has felt the pain of separation, the fear of the future, the loss of a country or a language or a loved one. It's the quantum love story of a one-eyed boy and mute girl moving through time to an island monastery of refuge-where stones have become dreams, dreams have become bones, bones have become prayers and prayers have become us.

The Scrolls are replete with phantasmagorical elements in which even ghosts have flesh and blood, and being is time, where crows speak, elephants and dragons wander in and out of the telling, and the Old Story, the scrolls themselves, unfold before us. The novel welds post-modernist narrative techniques to traditional discourse-the seamless integration of rhythmical prose, lyrical poetry, and proverbial utterance is dazzling. Pathos presides, not bathos: terrible beauty is born and reborn.

This astonishing and dizzyingly extensive work smashes all barriers of time and space, so that when you are done with its dark & light pages full, incidentally, of multicolored ensō (Zen circle) art works, you don't know who you are or where you have been, though its vividly realized scenes are stunningly clear. Scrolls of a Temple Sweeper is itself an extended Zen koan that plays on the flute of traditional Zen literary tropes like a virtuoso.