The author's search begins in the rolling hills of Maryland where she gets all the essentials of a 'perfect' childhood. Her elders, however, have completely different needs. When her family moves to the city with the highest per capita income in the United States, young Susan is brought into the huge and impersonal world of New York City. Susan finds that she is not a material girl. She hates the regimented life of a cog in the giant machine of an urban space that works like a precision clock. For some, living in the Big Apple is the ultimate temptation. But her soul wants to escape and go somewhere, anywhere.
The word 'wanderlust' doesn't quite catch the essence of such an urge to move on, to keep going. To use a Nepali word, the spirit of yayabar-a wanderer on an endless journey of eternal search-casts a spell on a girl barely in her teens. Lesser mortals in her place would have chosen to suppress the yearning with the help of stormy relationships, psychedelic drugs or a determined go at the career ladder towards the glass ceiling.
Susan being Susan, yields to her longing and finds herself in Finland. By page 7 of this slim volume, she is 'gompa-stomping' in Zanskar. Two pages later, she complains about one of her fellow trekkers to Mustang whose 'prodigious snores set the village dogs barking and the mules braying'. You brace yourself for a roller coaster read. Then she suddenly arrives in a village in Dolpo, and her expressions get mellower.
The intrepid explorer propels herself from one unusual destination to another. The text jumps from potted philosophy ('When the student is ready, the teacher will appear') to romantic mush ('Over he comes, a good six feet tall, with black beard flecked with grey and snow, obviously at home with the elements'), and sermons from the mount ('Power can be many things') to bitter doses of prosaic realism ('Much of the real Nepal that many tourists seek is desperately poor, and not very romantic. Babies die, children die, women die in childbirth.') at such a pace that it makes an unprepared reader want to come up for air after each page.
The author smothers her readers with her own zing and zest. After a while, you wish you could just put the book away and gaze out of your window at what lies beyond the mountains. The problem of keeping up with the speed of reflections in a memoir is perhaps generic. It's not very often that two complete strangers-a writer and her reader-share the same level of energy and stamina. Susan obviously feels that her explorations are so deep, her experiences so profound, and her knowledge so practical that to deny any of it would be gross injustice to her readers. "Na?ve Nordic," says someone who knows her well.
My practical advice to anyone buying this book: don't try the full volume at one go. It's a long way from a log cabin in Norway to Bajhang and you have to take it in controlled doses. The book is illusrated with serene black and white photographs. Paper and print quality of even the soft-cover volume are of coffee-table class. Quite obviously, this book isn't directly aimed at Nepali readers. But then it's not aimed at any other particular readership either. Susan seems to have written this book in order to let it float, not unlike her own fancy-free soul. A good parting gift for visitors, perhaps?
