The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise by Pico Iyer (Riverhead Books)

“What kind of paradise can ever be found in a world of increasing conflict?” This is the question that prompts Pico Iyer to cast his lively mind upon finding a paradise in earth, a location that  many of us would love to find after these past three years of illness, isolation, and death. Iyer, being a tease and iconoclast, explores the spots conventionally agreed upon as paradisiacal and ones that few would think of in those terms. His search begins in a country that attracts few tourists, the place he claims where the idea of paradise began.

Iran is where “paradise” began. “Paradaija” was coined in Iran and made its way to Greece where it was stolen and transmitted to a multiplicity of languages. In the Farsi language of Iran, “garden” and “paradise” share the same word, one that is reflected in Persian gardens, “ravishing visions of paradise,” and is used generously by that country’s poets. Iyer finds a foretaste of paradise when he’s driven down “quiet country roads lined with orchards of cherries and peaches.” When he reaches his destination, the home of the Iranian equivalent to Shakespeare, his driver unexpectedly recites one of the dead poet’s famous works, declaiming “I have made the world through a paradise of words.”

It’s through words that Iyer discovers the underlying puzzle of this beautiful country. Iran, a guide tells him, invented the double-edged sword and Iyer finds that same double purpose in the enigmatic words of the Iranian people whom he talks to. This is, he decides, “a world of suggestions, not certainty.”

Moving on, he chooses North Korea, which calls itself “the people’s paradise.” Examining this, he discovers the “ruthless elimination of imperfection,” beside which the fate of humans is secondary. The urban glories of Pyongyang he dismisses as a “massive stage set,” in which the skyscrapers are “ghost towers,” unused and empty. If paradise is a surreal state, Iyer has found it here.

From there he travels to Kashmir, long acknowledged to be India’s paradise, beloved by travelers, and filled with 600,000 Indian soldiers to quell the threat of Islamic rule; to the most remote Australian town that he can find, Broome, which isn’t paradise at all but shows “a different kind of reality”  to those who aren’t its Aboriginal inhabitants; to Ladakh, where he relives his “video nights” in a mountain paradise that was once a stop on the Silk Road and still absorbs imported foreign influences that change the surface but leave the core intact; to Sri Lanka, a legendary island paradise steeped in Buddhism and racked by suicide bombers, where Hindu Tamil and Buddhist Sinhalese are locked in a bloodbath of warfare.

In the end, Iyer goes to Varanisi, saying “I was unlikely to mistake it for paradise,” even though if one dies there, on the banks of its filthy river, paradise in the form of moksha, the end of reincarnation and all suffering, is guaranteed. Therefore it’s a city where people come to die, with flaming corpses lying upon burning ghats in “twenty-four hour cremations”, where others purify their lives by bathing in the Ganges, a holy river that flows past thirty sewers and is clogged with fecal coliform bacteria. In this place that Iyer calls a “Boschian riddle,” a city of ideas and belief, guided by ancient customs, he remembers a teaching of a Zen master, “The struggle of your life is your paradise.”

Iyer has always been a writer of froth and charm, with brilliant observations and shallow thoughts. In The Half Known Life, he returns to cities he visited in the past and examines them with the intellect he denied his readers in the past. This may well be the closest he will come to a biography, with his hints of his personal life--still a tease in spite of his often dazzling ideas that lurk beneath his cleverness. He’s written an invitation for all of us, to examine the struggle of our lives and discover our own paradise.~Janet Brown