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A Plumber's Progress: ISBN: 9781877135897 Release: 11-2003 Subject: Travel Format: Paperback RRP: NZ$16.99 |
A Plumber's Progress is a wry, comic, self-effacing and yet impassioned account of the author's attempts to find a route to happiness and self-acceptance. He tries what has become a fairly traditional method for dissatisfied, spiritually questioning Westerners – a physical journey to the East. He climbs a sacred mountain in Tibet; this after ten years of living and working in an ashram in New York.
The story is part travelogue, part spiritual quest, part autobiography. Its appeal lies in the acknowledgement that the deeper questions about mortality and meaning also afflict so-called 'ordinary' people in their daily lives, not just intellectuals and philosophers.
O'Connell has a gift for understatement, and has a lovely, often unusual descriptive talent which ranges from the lyrical, to the sharp, to the very funny. Much stands out as memorable. His journey is told in a warm, humorous fashion without sentiment – his honesty is refreshing. For those who have travelled to Tibet, it will be vividly realistic and accurate, and engaging and enjoyable for the rest of us armchair travellers.
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A note from the author ...
“Great book,” said Elizabeth Gilbert, “thank God.” Someone in the ashram had given her a copy of my book A Plumber’s Progress insisting she read it. This is one of the traps for successful writers, every wannabe wants their approval, mostly leaving the more accomplished one with a fraught choice between a response of brutal honesty or a polite lie.
Janame O’Connell |
Liz was in India gathering experiences for her own book. At the time, she was calling it The Wandering I, subsequently it became the best seller Eat, Pray, Love. We became literary buddies, sharing life’s mysteries, writer’s tales and the poems that popped from our experiences of monastic life in an ashram.
She called me ‘the Poet/Plumber’, I called her attention to how to go onto an Indian roof at sundown and let go of the dead flowers of her life. Now I’m in her book and she is on Oprah. Strange are the ways of karma.