‘Aren’t you going back to the Netherlands?’, Casper Luckerhof’s father asks on one of the last pages of restless to his son. “No,” she exclaims. ‘Of course I’m not going back to the Netherlands with you. My place is here.’
Here, that is Lumbini, the sacred place in Nepal where Buddha is said to have been born almost 2,600 years ago. Luckerhof has settled there, initially to write a biography of Buddha, one in which he is exposed as a power-hungry cult leader, an ‘unpleasant charlatan’, also someone ‘who was not even sure whether he had existed’.
He wants that partly, but not only, to show his parents who this figure really was. Luckerhof grew up in a house full of Buddha statues, with parents who were filled with Buddhism. Mother especially adored everything that smacked of India and Nepal, at one point even the Bhagwan. As a toddler of 3, he was carried on his father’s shoulders to Buddha’s birthplace.
For Luckerhof, the trip to Nepal in his mid-twenties is therefore both an attempt to earn the approval of his parents and more or less the opposite: an attempt to prove ‘that I can do everything all by myself’.
Which gives ambiguity restless a curious tension, a constant hint of ambition, failure and desire for meaning. It eventually leads to a loving release on the snowy mountain pass Thorong La, high in the Himalayas. That Ella Fitzgerald in the background I love Paris sings, is one of the nice details that can be picked up here and there in this ‘memoir’, as the publisher has called it.
The Buddha’s biography soon fades from view. Luckerhof accepts a job as a librarian at the Lumbini International Research Institute, a library funded by a Japanese Buddhist sect and home to more than 40,000 books on Buddha and Buddhism.
It is the experiences – or perhaps the lack of them – in this curious institution that form the backbone of the book. The purpose of the library on earth is soon made clear to the I-person by the other members of the academic staff, consisting only of the Italian director Claudio and former director Christoph, a German Tibetologist whom Luckerhof greatly admires and who essentially still holds sway.
The goal is not to let outsiders study books, let alone to lend them. After all, it is of the utmost importance, says Christoph, that no book is touched. “Only the very best Buddhists are allowed to consult our collection.” But, the young librarian argues, do academics never come to Lumbini? ‘Exactly, that makes your work very clear.’
What is the institute’s raison d’être? The answer to that question, or ‘our secret’, as Christoph calls it, is of an almost Buddhist serenity: to maintain the institution. Even if half the world goes up in flames, the German says, ‘these manuscripts and books will still be there as always’.
With this, and with Luckerhof’s extremely humorous description of the day-to-day running of the library, restless somewhat reminiscent of the famous series about that other institution. The deskbut with the self-mockery that was missing from JJ Voskuil, who, after all, only pissed off his colleagues.
Not so Luckerhof. He stutters, is clumsy in love and, together with his two colleagues, cultivates a daily rhythm, the highlight of which is the daily choice between eating in hotel Kasai or eating in hotel Hokke, where the charming Maya serves.
Meanwhile, the cataloging of the book stock continues steadily, a task described with a sense of absurdity. The scene with the stamp (no spoilers here) is a hilarious highlight.
“I just want something to work out here in Nepal,” the librarian sighs to his father, high up in the cold of the Thorong La. “Everything has failed so far. My book on Buddha. My job. Love. Everything.’
But not this memoir, thank God, written without literary finery.
Casper Luckerhof: Restless – Stranded in the Land of the Buddha. Ambo Anthos; 248 pages; €22.99.
