The Earth House - Hardcover

pictured themselves as the sort of people to take up Eastern spiritual practice. But on their first visit to a Zen center, two women discover something that speaks to them on a level deeper than their everyday experience, and they begin to make a new plan for their lives. What if they were to give up their suburban comforts and build a house beside a monastery in the mountains?

As the walls of the house go up, the two women make and re-make plans, wrestle with a chainsaw, learn to make windows, and set up a computer powered by the sun. Their spiritual practice transforms their vision of the house, and the building of it transforms them both. But their endeavor leads to an ending, not a beginning -- at least not the kind of beginning they'd had in mind . . .

"A moving meditation on life, death, love, and Zen Buddhism." Feminist Bookstore News

After their involvement with a Zen Buddhist Center intensifies, the author and her companion Sylvia decide to design and build their own rustic home on a plot of land DuPrau has bought from the center. The effort to create an ideal house soon turns all-consuming, but this memoir of its ups and downs also grapples with the subject of mortality, as Sylvia becomes ill and eventually dies from melanoma. The author describes the benefits of Zen philosophy, which has strongly influenced her life, in a low-key, occasionally soporific manner. Her account of her suffering after Sylvia's death is handled well, but the unrelieved introspection ultimately wears thin. Followers of Zen Buddhism and meditative philosphies will be interested.
- Harriet Gottfried, NYPL
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.