What I Didn't See and Other Stories by Karen Joy Fowler

The power of books is mysterious indeed. Sometimes I can't help but believe there is some natural literary force at work in my world, one that puts the perfect book into my hands at just the moment I need it.

I wasn't looking for a new book when I went into the library last week. There are stacks of library books on top of and next to my bedside table. The shelves in my office are loaded with books I own and haven't read. My schedule is full and will get even more full with the explosion of end-of-the-year activities at my kids' schools. The last thing I needed was another book I wouldn't be able to focus my full attention on.

But I am a compulsive skimmer of the New Books Shelves at the Greenwood Library. My fingers twitch when a cover or interesting title catches my eye (take note book designers, good covers do attract).

And there it was: a mountain gorilla floating in an open, homemade submarine on the cover of What I Didn't See and Other Stories by Karen Joy Fowler. How could I resist? Especially when the blurb inside says that in these stories "the fantastic and the uncanny lurk just below the surface of ordinary lives...?"

It's a great description. The characters in these stories do seem ordinary, familiar. We know them. That teenage girl....You know, the one down the street who's doing a little experimenting, breaking some rules. Or the elderly woman the next block over...wasn't she an explorer or something in her youth? That guy...you know he was never the same after Vietnam. Or the woman in the house by the waterfront, what's the story with her child?

All of these ordinary people have something in their lives that takes this very sense of familiarity for a turn. Each story takes our expectations and tilts them sideways so we both connect with and find ourselves at a distance from what is going on. It makes for compelling reading.

I've written before about the difficulty of the short story form and how much I admire writers who are masters of the craft. Karen Joy Fowler is my new favorite. There is not one story in this collection that can't hold its own against the others. Fowler grabs our interest from the first paragraph; she builds tension and suspense through each scene; we see the characters develop throughout the arc of the story; and we wish for just a little more after each one ends, even when that ending is perfect.

Did I need another book to add to my pile the day I went to the library? No. I wanted Karen Joy Fowler's What I Didn't See, I just didn't realize it at first. What I Didn't See never made it to the pile of unread books. It traveled around with me, providing much needed interludes of story during a week in which downtime seemed impossible to find.

Sleepwalker by John Toomey

Sleepwalker is a short walk in the life of Stuart Byrne, a 25-year-old Dubliner heading fast and furious into an existential crisis. Narrated by the slightly unreliable Tom, a jaded, yet optimistic former classmate of Stuart's, we catch a glimpse of a young man tottering on the brink of a huge revelation about life and about himself.

Stuart is the typical golden boy, all looks and charm. He is the favored son in an affluent family, the perfect foil for his dissolute older brother and emotionally exhausted sister. Stuart conducts himself well in college and acquires a well-paying job almost immediately after an "independent" summer bar tending in London. Stuart never lacks for a girlfriend and is emotionally anchored by his intense platonic relationship with his best friend, Rachel.

But one Friday morning, Stuart finds himself unable to get out of bed to go to his soul-killing PR job and calls in sick. It is the start of a five-day binge of booze, girls, and bad choices, and by the end Stuart fears he has lost everything. Career gone. Best friend gone. Future gone. Can fate truly leave such a promising young man bereft after just a week of excess?

John Toomey's Sleepwalker has some of the same qualities many of Nick Hornby's novels have, particularly Hornby's About a Boy. It is an Everyman story. Stuart is one of those young guys we come across all the time. The life before him is an open road; he has an overwhelming sense of entitlement and an accompanying shallowness that comes from having had everything more or less handed to him. Stuart is flawed, like Hornby's characters are inevitably flawed, but there is hope for him as he faces the first big personal crisis of his life.

Toomey obviously has affection for his protagonist. But he also doesn't allow his affection to get in the way of his critique of Stuart's apparent inability to grow up. With a great deal of humor and insight, Toomey breaks Stuart down for us and puts him right back together again, but the question remains: will Stuart leaves his own story a bigger person or will continue his sleepwalking path through life?

The Open Road by Pico Iyer

A post about the Dalai Lama, a world leader who has devoted his life promoting peace to counteract the news about the death of a man wholly devoted to violence.

The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama by Pico Iyer is not a biography of the Dalai Lama or even a memoir of Iyer's experiences with the Dalai Lama, though sometimes there is a little of both in the text. Iyer explains the purpose for his book early on: "...I was intrigued by the quiet revolution [the Dalai Lama] was promulgating, challenging us to see politics, globalism, celebrity itself, in a larger and more spacious light, and I was interested to examine all the challenges and questions his experiments entailed."

Pico Iyer is in a good position to do this. He was first introduced to the Dalai Lama a teenager by his father, himself a philosopher. For 30 years, Iyer--who is not himself a Buddhist--has visited with the Dalai Lama and has occasionally followed him on his travels around the world. Through this relationship with the Dalai Lama and open access to those who surround him, including family members and long time aides, Iyer offers a fascinating view into the extremely complicated world the Dalai Lama inhabits as both a politician and a spiritual leader of a nation in exile.

Iyer's book is fascinating because he is writing as a non-Buddhist for general readers who may not understand much about the Dalai Lama's role as a monk and god incarnate of his people. He also very clearly explains the political dilemma of the Tibetan people, some of whom are living in a re-created Tibet in Dharamsala, India, with the Dalai Lama, and some of whom are still living in Chinese occupied Tibet. After reading this book, readers will see how these intertwined elements of Tibetan culture complicate their overall situation and how much exhausting work the Dalai Lama engages in every day as he tries to be both a political and spiritual leader for his people. Politics and religion so often seem either mutually exclusive or mutually destructive, and the Dalai Lama works every day for a balance between the two.

The Dalai Lama himself is an incredible figure. He is, always, a humble monk, but one who sees it as imperative to engage with the larger global community. This is not just to bring attention to the occupation and destruction of his country, but it is also because he believes that only through globalization will humanity find peace and respect for life. He doesn't only talk about walking the "middle path", but he also practices it. He keeps one foot in the ancient origins of his culture and religion and the other in a modern world of science and technology. He believes we can attain enlightenment from whatever religious tradition we espouse (he does not encourage people to leave their religious foundations in order to "convert" to his), but says that being overly dogmatic can also inhibit us from becoming our best selves. He is a political leader who consistently exhorts his people to depend on their democratically elected parliament and prime minister to lead them rather than himself.

I leave this book feeling much more educated about a person and a people who I thought I knew something about. After reading it I realized that what I knew about the Dalai Lama was mainly based on a sort of bumper sticker education. I had read quotations from his books and speeches; I had seen the "Free Tibet" signs; I had watched Seven Years in Tibet, but what I truly understood was just the tiniest bit of a very large and very complex picture. At least I knew that the Dalai Lama is a crucially important voice in our ever more disrupted world...but now I have a sense of why.