Collective Buddhas

The Buddha in the Attic is one of the more interesting books I've read lately. I've never read a book before that was told from a collective viewpoint rather than an individualistic one, and I found the experience rather dichotomous. On the one hand, I loved the style because of the cadence and almost soporific rhythm that came of it and on the other hand I found it to be frustrating because I couldn't connect with the book overall. It was like moving through a dream, where all these experiences happened but I knew it was a dream because it didn't feel real.

I think for me, I couldn't feel close to the characters because I didn't feel like I was supposed to. I didn't really pick out any individual characters since it was written in a collective voice and that's how I read it. If the book had been written with only a few women in a collective voice, I think it would have been easier to pick those voices out individually and connect to them that way. But with the book written the way it was, I decided that the "character" was actually the group and while I could feel empathy for all of those experiences, it didn't make me feel connected. Not in the sense that an individual character would, where I could try to put myself into that person's mind and live the book through them.

While I couldn't connect to any of these women, I was still able to envision them. Again, not truly as individuals, but as a collective. The story was written so beautifully, and evocatively, that it was easy to picture in my mind. But again, I think it was with an almost dreamlike quality. The images were there, but without distinguishing features. 

But it's still hard to tell whether the characters and this book felt real to me. In one sense, no they didn't, because I couldn't connect to them or really 'see' them. But they also feel real because I know that somewhere out there, years ago, they were real. Not these characters explicitly, but what they represented. And for me, that in part makes it feel more realistic than I think another book done in the collective voice would have. If this had been a fantasy novel about slaying dragons in the collective voice, then no, they would not have felt real at all. It probably would have been quite boring as well. But since this was historical fiction, it felt a bit more memoir like to me.  Distant, but at the same time, real.