Better To Have Gone
Love, Death and the Quest for Utopia in Auroville
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
'Beautifully written and structured, deeply moving, and realised in wise, thoughtful, chiselled prose... it is that rarity: a genuine non-fiction classic' William Dalrymple
'A troubling and moving account of lives gone wrong in the search for an eastern Utopia' Damon Galgut, author of the Booker Prize-winning The Promise
A spellbinding story about love, faith, the search for utopia - and the often devastating cost of idealism.
It’s the late 1960s, and two lovers converge on an arid patch of earth in South India. John Walker is the handsome scion of a powerful East Coast American family. Diane Maes is a beautiful hippie from Belgium. They have come to build a new world - Auroville, an international utopian community for thousands of people. Their faith is strong, the future bright.
So how do John and Diane end up dying two decades later, on the same day, on a cracked concrete floor in a thatch hut by a remote canyon? This is the mystery Akash Kapur sets out to solve in Better to Have Gone, and it carries deep personal resonance: Diane and John were the parents of Akash’s wife, Auralice. Akash and Auralice grew up in Auroville; like the rest of their community, they never really understood those deaths.
In 2004, Akash and Auralice return to Auroville from New York, where they have been living with John’s family. As they re-establish themselves, along with their two sons, in the community, they must confront the ghosts of those distant deaths. Slowly, they come to understand how the tragic individual fates of John and Diane intersected with the collective history of their town.
Better to Have Gone is a book about the human cost of our age-old quest for a more perfect world. It probes the under-explored yet universal idea of utopia, and it portrays in vivid detail the daily life of one utopian community. Richly atmospheric and filled with remarkable characters, spread across time and continents, this is narrative writing of the highest order - a heartbreaking, unforgettable story.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Kapur (India Becoming) takes an enlightening look at how a well-meaning utopian community in India became complicated by reality. In a propulsive narrative, he chronicles the story of John Walker and Diane Maes, the parents of his wife, Auralice, who left their homes in the waning days of the hippie movement for South India's idealistic "planned city" Auroville, which grew out of an ashram, where they were "joined by hundreds and then thousands of others"—including Kapur and his parents. (Kapur and Auralice met as kids and reunited years later attending college in America.) Designed to encourage "human unity," Auroville offered nothing but harmony, until John fell mysteriously ill and died at 44, and Diane, shortly after, committed suicide. At just 14, Auralice was shipped off to New York City to live with a relative and contend with her paternal family's resentment toward a community that left her parents dead, and may have been behind such shady occurrences as letters allegedly written by her sick father to her grandfather requesting financial help. The most captivating twist, though, is that when Kapur and Auralice decided to return to Auroville in 2004, they found "a thriving township of about three and half thousand people from fifty-nine countries." Expect the unexpected in this riveting story.
