Book description
Sex is forbidden at the Dasgupta Institute. So what is the sparkling,
magnetically attractive Beth Marriot doing here? Why is a young woman
whose irrepressible vitality and confident ego were once set on
conquest and stardom, now spending month after month serving in the
vegetarian kitchen of a bizarrely severe Buddhist retreat?
Beth is fighting demons: a catastrophic series of events has
undermined all prospect of happiness. Trauma leaves her no alternative
but to bury herself in the austere asceticism of a community that
wakes at 4am, doesn't permit eye contact, let alone speech, and keeps
men and women strictly segregated. But the curious self dies hard.
Conflicted and wayward, Beth stumbles on a diary and cannot keep away
from it, or the man who wrote it. And the more she yearns for the
purity of the retreat's silent priestess, the more she desires the
priestess herself.
The Server sets western individualism against the Buddhist
belief that what we call 'self' is insubstantial fantasy. Unsure of
anything but pain and pleasure, Beth's constant invention and
destruction of herself and the people around her is both riveting and
highly entertaining.
Born in Manchester, Tim Parks grew up in London and studied at
Cambridge and Harvard. In 1981 he moved to Italy where he has lived ever
since. He is the author of novels, non-fiction and essays, including
Europa,
Cleaver
,
A Season with Verona
and
Teach Us to Sit Still
. He has won the Somerset Maugham, Betty Trask and Llewellyn Rhys
awards, and been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He lectures on
literary translation in Milan, writes for publications such as the
New Yorker
and the
New York Review of Books
, and his many translations from the Italian include works by Moravia,
Calvino, Calasso, Tabucchi and Machiavelli.
