Buddha Boy

The Braindead Megaphone, by George Saunders
(Pocket Book Review # 12)



George Saunders saves the best for last in his new essay collection. "Buddha Boy" describes his journey to a remote village in Nepal to investigate a fifteen year-old buddhist who has been meditating under a tree for seven months. In that time, apparently, the boy hasn't eaten, or even moved.

Saunders weaves Nepal's beauty and ramshackle poverty together with armchair soliloquies on Buddhism, suffering, and revelation, he lampoons his own failings as a journalist, and he tries to catch the locals sneaking the boy food, all the while maintaining a perfect balance of skepticism, sympathy, and reverance for his subject. It's a nice little story about our tentative and uneasy relationship with the miraculous.

"Manifesto," the last piece, is something I think I first saw in the New Yorker. It's a perfect, timeless, satire, a political screed from the mythical group People Reluctant to Kill for an Abstraction (PKRA).