Unbearable Beauty

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Unbearable Beauty, a work of literary fiction which will forever change the way you see love. After her brutal rape, Uma begs Kamadev, the Hindu god of love and desire, to possess her infant nephew, Achilles, to make him supremely beautiful so she can get revenge on the world by breaking countless hearts. After seven years of frantic prayers, Achilles is indeed possessed, but then his father gives him a book of Sufi poems and tells him that they will help him find one good thing in himself—his one good thing. Achilles grows up to be the paradigm of beauty, a famous actor subservient to a ruthless film production company named The Studio and is managed by Josh who is more concerned about owning Achilles’ beauty than he is about his career. But Achilles has a dangerous secret that he foolishly confides only to Josh but which compels him to give up everything and search for his one good thing in the ancient holy city of Varanasi, India, accompanied by his friend, Neville, who searches for meaning through beauty and has his own secrets from his childhood in Jamaica. There they meet Sundar Singh--a Sikh who is desperately searching for the meaning of manhood--an Aghori sadhu named Rudra who drinks from skulls and eats human flesh, who becomes Achilles’ guru and who also gives a boy named Vijay a talisman to stop his sister-in-law from starving him, and Satya, a playback singer who has given up her career to be with a man who she believes is her husband brought back from the dead—who is actually Dharmananda, the guru of an ashram outside the city and whose most enticing miracle is that marigolds appear in his footsteps which are lovingly retrieved by his most ardent devotee, Kumar, who is obsessed with escaping the pain of life by merging with the Supreme.

Filled with mysticism, romance, and profound friendship, an odyssey ranging from the jungles of Jamaica and across wide and broad India, written in the style of magical realism, Unbearable Beauty is a meditation on the true meaning of love, a story about the search for beauty which is the search for love which is the search for God, a dream within a dream within a dream evoking the spirit of Bollywood Meets Carlos Castaneda and ultimate transcendence.