Breakfast with Buddha by Roland Merullo


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Just now I finished a book that was the most spiritual moving I have read in a long time and the funniest! I am reeling with its images.

It is “Breakfast with the Buddha” by Roland Merullo. A novel.

“Otto Ringling is a food-book editor and a happily married father of two living in a New York suburb. After Otto's North Dakota parents are killed in a car crash, he plans to drive his ebulliently New Age sister, Cecilia, back home to sell the family farm. But when Otto arrives to pick up Cecilia in Paterson, N.J. (where she does tarot readings and past-life regressions), she declares her intention to give her half of the farm to her guru, Volvo Rinpoche, who will set up a retreat there. Cecilia asks Otto to take Rinpoche to North Dakota instead; after a fit of skeptical rage in which he rails internally against his sister's gullibility, he accepts, and the novel is off and running.” (Publisher’s weekly). But the book is not about a road trip, it is about a spiritual journey. As we read, Otto changes before our very eyes. It is funny and profound.

I don't want to write about the wisdom of the book for fear of diluting it. I could not put it down and yet, it was not suspensful nor was there a mystery in the genre sense to solve. It was about the life of good people.

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