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Better to Have Gone: Love, Death, and the Quest for Utopia in Auroville
Maybe someday
42
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
18/100Critics
67/100Scholars
Author:
Akash Kapur
Publisher:
Scribner
Date:
July 20, 2021
A journalist looks back at Auroville, the utopian community in South India where he grew up. Above all, he seeks to understand the mystery of the deaths of John Walker and Diane Maes, the parents of his wife, with whom he grew up in Auroville and later returns to raise his own family.
What The Reviewers Say
This is a haunting, heartbreaking story, deeply researched and lucidly told, with an almost painful emotional honesty—the use of present tense weaving a kind of trance. I kept wanting to read Better to Have Gone because I found it so gripping; I kept wanting not to read it because I found it so upsetting. The image that came to mind, again and again, was of human lives being dashed against the rocks of rigid belief.
... extraordinary.
Kapur weaves together memoir, history and ethnography to tell a story of the desire for utopia and the cruelties committed in its name. It’s not an unusual story, perhaps — there’s always been a fine line between utopia and dystopia (see Jonestown) — but it is told with a native son’s fondness, fury, stubborn loyalty, exasperated amusement.
Befitting a book about a spiritual community, this is the tale of the journey as much as the destination. Kapur is a terrific storyteller, and even though you’re told a lot up front, his writing compels you to follow him as he digs deeper. The Mother is, as you’d expect, creepy and compelling, and a sense of foreboding is ever present.
