It is a remarkable feat to read a book that follows a day in the life of a would-be Zen Buddhist, in essentially real-time, and come away feeling refreshed, lighter, hopeful and – perhaps – more zen. Yet this is precisely what John Manderino’s latest book, Bopper’s Progess, does.
Written in a fragmentary form, with our first person narrator setting an informal tone, we follow the trials and tribulations of the titular protagonist, Bopper, in his quest for enlightenment (though it turns out enlightenment may just be a stand in for getting over an ex).
The humour is excellent, the writing succinct, full of flavour and character – and the overall effect is rather like spending an evening with a very close friend talking casually as the sun sets about life, love, people you hate, people you miss, the furtive feelings that keep you up at night and the existential crises we try to ignore.
The simple tactic Manderino employs of writing in the present tense of course reflects one of Zen’s main teachings: that the present moment is what matters more than anything else. In our western relationship with time, in which we compulsively pick over the past in order to learn lessons from it, and then project into a hypothetical future in which those lessons can be applied, the present moment has been compressed to a tiny sliver on the clock face between a vast past and an infinite future.
Bopper, we see, is entirely consumed by this western approach to time: of pouring over the past so that it consumes his present. Yet in reading the book in our own present, a strange thing happens – our consciousness drifts (as should be the case when reading good fiction), and suddenly we are unaware of ourselves in the relationship between book and reader. Our empathy with Bopper transcends time and space – as well as our own egos.
It’s a brilliant thing – until, of course, you realise you are thinking about how you have just transcended the self (perhaps moving to the edge of enlightenment) and now you are thinking about thinking about that, and the whole thing collapses into an overdose of self-awareness.
At its heart, this is a book about trying to make sense of the world and in that way it truly is a book for our times, since we find ourselves living as we do in an era of political polarisation; with tyrants and despots in the highest echelons of world power, where previously firmly-held ‘truths’ or assumptions have been challenged or proven to be false. In a world of fake news and both traditional and social or disruptive media bias, it is increasingly difficult to tell fact from fiction.
Of course, the search for meaning in life is not new. Human beings have likely been searching for it since the dawn of consciousness. Though it likely remains true that the only thing that anyone really can know for sure is that nobody can ever know everything. What’s more, the more you study life and the world around you, the more you realise that everything is contradiction and paradox, and no one really knows much for sure, however loudly they profess to the contrary.
In both these ways, Boppers Progress speaks to something inseparable from ourselves and connects directly to our human spirit. We are all of us striving, in one way or another, for answers, perhaps to questions we don’t yet know we are asking.
Buy Bopper’s Progress from publisher Wundor Editions here https://wundor-store.myshopify.com/products/boppers-progress-by-john-manderino
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