Synopsis
A champion swimmer gives up her comfortable married life in an exclusive suburb in Connecticut to follow a guru to India, where she immerses herself in the wisdom of the East and achieves a deepening spirituality--at a price.
Reviews
Again Tuck (Interviewing Matisse: or The Woman Who Died Standing Up) has taken stylistic risks and emerged triumphant. Her stark prose and allegory-inside-allegory narrative tug the reader, like an ancient Eastern conundrum, toward a "realization which is beyond understanding." Adele is a Connecticut woman of style, spoiled and lucky, solipsistic in her youth, superstitious now. When she visits Chartres with her husband Howard and two children on the day of the airing of the sacra camisa, she meets an Indian guru, whom she thereafter refers to as "Him," in the cathedral. That very day, Adele follows Him to Bombay, where she must learn to do nothing, forget everything. Her chameleon-like mentor gives her a room in His family-filled house but makes no promises, and as Adele lists sins and sheds habits and treasured objects, she moves toward an ascetic purity. He tells her she can't go back to her old life. Yet Adele does go back-to the beach resort her family has always frequented. An accomplished swimmer whose physicality often is part of her spirituality, Adele takes daring marathon swims far out in the Caribbean. The narrator, who has watched from the safety of the shore, is there on the day she doesn't return. Her husband is a material man who now grapples with his loss through incomprehensible dreams; the narrator, once an unheard listener, becomes the voice of enlightenment. This deftly and deceptively simple book is wondrously deep.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Mesmerizing in its simplicity, this second novel from Tuck (Interviewing Matisse, or, the Woman Who Died Standing Up, 1991) lyrically traces one woman's search for spiritual enlightenment and self-fulfillment--or at least for a life away from suburban Connecticut. Reminiscent of Alan Lightman's Einstein's Dreams, the story is broken into 76 slim, self-contained, dreamlike chapters. Each of these, randomly strung together, builds an engrossing portrait of Adele--a shining star of a woman, so charming and admirable that she draws everyone into her orbit. Her defining feature (and Tuck's recurring theme, repeated in a series of mystic tales on the requirements needed to walk on water) is her courage in the ocean: Bystanders gawk as Adele and her three Irish setters swim out so far they're transformed into dots on the horizon. The narrator is an unnamed friend, an annual companion at the exclusive Caribbean resort Adele and her family frequent, an unabashed admirer of Adele's near-mythic personalty. She pieces together the story of their friendship, of Adele's past, and, most importantly, of Adele's scandalous decision to leave her relatively happy life with husband and two children to follow an Indian guru she meets while vacationing in France. In an attempt to get her home from India, Adele's husband, Howard, promises her a solitary trip to the Caribbean to think things over, sending her dogs down for swimming companionship. It's there that Adele tells about her strange adventures of self-abnegation with the guru, her thinning body and graying hair, and, stranger still, her inability to leave His presence. As each passage shifts into the next, explanations are expected for Adele's abandonment of home and hearth. Instead of answers, though, there come parables of enlightenment that, finally, make a far stronger case for Adele's submission to the guru than any stubbornness or weakness of will. An exquisite, gem-like treatise on the nature of illumination- -a case study of metamorphosis. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Tuck, author of Interviewing Matisse; or, The Woman Who Died Standing Up (1991), leaves much to the imagination in this spare novel about a woman's quest for enlightenment. Indeed, this compelling and enigmatic tale is not unlike a Zen koan, a paradox fashioned to inspire sustained, even circular meditation. We only know Tuck's heroine, Adele, through the eyes of an unnamed narrator, a woman who meets Adele at a Caribbean resort. The narrator, a former dancer, watches Adele and her three Irish setters swim alarmingly far out into the deep turquoise sea, so far out that they all but disappear. After they make their triumphant return, the women and the dogs sit and rest on the bright beach, and Adele tells her new friend about her sojourns in India, where she studied with an uncompromising guru. So taken was Adele with this stern man's teachings, she left her wealthy Connecticut husband and their two children to live the strictly controlled and comfortless life of a disciple. What wisdom did she acquire? What pain and loneliness did she suffer? Tuck lets us draw our own conclusions. Donna Seaman
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