Archive - December 25, 2012

Lunch with Buddha Roland Merullo (Micronesia 1979-80) AJAR Contemporaries 347 Pages Paperback $16.85 2012 Reviewed by Tony D’Souza (Ivory Coast 2000-02, Madagascar 2002-03) GOD COMES IN MANY FORMS, so the saying goes, and in Roland Merullo’s latest offering, Lunch with Buddha, the “ultimate” is packaged in the guise of a burly, aging Russian Buddhist monk, Volya Rinpoche, who looks like a sun-burnished field peasant and behaves like a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, only dressed here in a monk’s robe and wandering the American highway. I must confess to not having read this novel’s precursor, Breakfast with Buddha, nor obviously the Dinner with Buddha that is certain to follow. Merullo seems to be striving for nothing less in this series than to lay the literary foundation of his own religion, a hybrid East-meets-West catchall to be named “Buddhianitry” or “Christian-Buddhism”; Volya Rinpoche hasn’t yet decided. The novel ends with . . .