Better to Have Gone
Love, Death and the Quest for Utopia in Auroville
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Better to Have Gone
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Narrated by:
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Vikas Adam
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By:
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Akash Kapur
About this listen
A spellbinding story about love, faith, the search for utopia - and the often devastating cost of idealism.
It’s the late 1960s, and two lovers converge on an arid patch of earth in South India. John Walker is the handsome scion of a powerful East Coast American family. Diane Maes is a beautiful hippie from Belgium. They have come to build a new world - Auroville, an international utopian community for thousands of people. Their faith is strong, the future bright.
So how do John and Diane end up dying two decades later, on the same day, on a cracked concrete floor in a thatch hut by a remote canyon? This is the mystery Akash Kapur sets out to solve in Better to Have Gone, and it carries deep personal resonance: Diane and John were the parents of Akash’s wife, Auralice. Akash and Auralice grew up in Auroville; like the rest of their community, they never really understood those deaths.
In 2004, Akash and Auralice return to Auroville from New York, where they have been living with John’s family. As they re-establish themselves, along with their two sons, in the community, they must confront the ghosts of those distant deaths. Slowly, they come to understand how the tragic individual fates of John and Diane intersected with the collective history of their town.
Better to Have Gone is a book about the human cost of our age-old quest for a more perfect world. It probes the under-explored yet universal idea of utopia, and it portrays in vivid detail the daily life of one utopian community. Richly atmospheric and filled with remarkable characters, spread across time and continents, this is narrative writing of the highest order - a heartbreaking, unforgettable story.©2021 Akash Kapur. All rights reserved. (P)2021 Simon & Schuster, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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What listeners say about Better to Have Gone
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Callum Crowe
- 29-08-21
a story for all
Captivating, heartfelt, heartbreaking, enlightening, curious, wasteful perhaps, but definitely beautiful. Unrelatable in a sense, yet poignant and brilliantly written. I hope the author and family are as happy with it as I am.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- Susan H
- 12-06-22
A fascinating glimpse inside an innovative community
Having followed Auroville for decades (and even at one time considered living there) I found this book gave a helpful context to a lot of what was hard to understand about Auroville as an outsider.
The story is fascinating, although the narrator can be a bit over the top breathless in his recounting of it. Another minor irritant is mispronounced French and Dutch - a quick online search would have avoided that. All in all worth a listen for anyone who knows it or wants a peek behind the curtain of communal living with so-called spiritual people.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- judy tweddle
- 01-09-21
extraordinary.
fantastic read... largely because I have stayed in Auroville and heard part of the story. So well researched, cleverly told, and riveting. Thankyou.
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Overall2 out of 5 stars
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Performance2 out of 5 stars
- Jane
- 05-01-22
poor narrator
I am going to return title as I found the narrator's portentous style annoying and I found the book's slow start was not enough to keep me going.
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