Two Stops Past Siberia

Beyond the Sky and the Earth, written by a Canadian woman who went there in in 1989 as an English teacher, seems like it could be a satellite fulfillment of Bhutan living fantasies.

The book begins with the narrator, a twenty something woman from a small industrial town with designs on grad school, feeling unsatisfied with the world of academia. Having never left her general area, she choses travel as a way out. After a couple of tough chapters, she finally gets to Bhutan. She then experiences a reasonable amount of culture shock, and generally feels ill prepared for the experience. She frequently laments the decisions, decries her surroundings, and longs for home. While her feelings are reasonable, they don’t make for exceptionally good reading. The saving graces however, are her elegant pros, keen eye for beauty, her genuinely humble nature, and the hope that she will soon come out of it.

And she does! Unfortunately, she jumps entirely to the other end of the spectrum. 150 pages into the book, she complains about how she never wants to return to Canada, how her new love for the inanimate construction of Bhutan, which exists only in her freshly enlightened mind, is replacing her love to her fiance in Canada. She begins to extoll the virtues of the “simple life” in rural Bhutan, how each individual thing in her scabby kitchen has value, no clutter, she professes. While these things can and should be appreciated, they need context. This is where the narrative begins to fall apart.

As the narrator grows into her surroundings, she grows less reasonable, less personable. Her chapters become shorter, and more disconnected, as if she’s got very little to say. Once she stops liking Canada, the pros become intolerable. All of the sudden, the place she’s known for only 5 months becomes grandly superioir to the one she knew for 25 years.

180 pages into this 300 page book, the narrative grinds to a halt. If readers wanted to hear why one country was simply better than another, we might as well read ethnocentric ramblings from the Age of Imperialism. Her writing is not an improvement, merely the same story told from the opposite angle.

By the end of the book, Ms. Zeppa comes to her senses. She recants many of her mid-story biases, and offers somewhat more object views on both places. However, the banalities of the journey make up little for the generic conclusion.

Avoid. In the opinion of the reviewer, this book owes publication to the exoticness of its setting. If it were not about Bhutan, and instead India, Morocco or some other more accessible destination, it is unlikely to have been published.