Sex Is Forbidden

Sit still. Observe the rule of silence. No sex, please, we're Buddhists. Welcome to the Dasgupta Institute, the setting for the latest novel by the multifaceted Parks. It's a pendant to his memoir Teach Us To Sit Still, in which he recounted his effort to ease physical ailments through spirituality. The participants at the institute are there for a ten-day course of spiritual exercises, presided over by a leader glimpsed only on-screen and who may or may not be still alive. Our narrator, Beth Marriot, though, is now in her ninth month as a server whose duties consist of meal preparation and janitorial functions (the novel was published in the UK in 2012 with the more appropriate title of The Server). Why is she here? Very gradually Beth's backstory is revealed, as she becomes obsessed with a male resident who is keeping a diary (writing is one of the many outlawed activities at Dasgupta), and her melodramatic past is filled in. Beth's quandary is deciding between the sheltered world of the institute and the lively, but dangerous, world outside the walls.