The Delight of Being
Ordinary: A Road Trip with the Pope and the Dalai Lama
A Novel, by Roland Merullo
A few pages into The
Delight of Being Ordinary I collapsed in a fit of nearly uncontrollable
giggles. They were triggered in part by the situation with which Roland Merullo
opens his novel (this is fiction, remember): Pope Francis and the Dalai Lama secretly
escape from the holy confines of the Vatican through an ancient underground
tunnel leading to the Castel Sant’Angelo; and in part by the slyly spot-on
portrayal of the two religious leaders. In particular—and I think this was what
set me off—Merullo perfectly captures the idiosyncratic English speech patterns
of the Dalai Lama, reflecting the Buddhist leader’s peculiar innocence, his wonder,
and simplicity. And His Holiness’s giggles, too.
Things were mostly a bit less hilarious from there on, but
there were some great absurdist moments along the way—many of them having to do
with the measures required to maintain the anonymity of two of the most famous
faces in the world. The escapade is organized and guided, at the Pope’s
insistence, by his cousin and chief aide, Paolo, who calls on the expertise of
his never-quite-ex wife, Rosa, an exuberant Neapolitan who has made a fortune
from a hair-styling and make-up service for Italy’s celebrities.
Disguised as a foreign tourist (the Pope), a rock star (the
Dalai Lama) and a dark-skinned immigrant from the Middle East (Paolo), the four
set out on their tour of the beautifully evoked Italian landscape and its
hillside villages and cities. Throughout, the famous tourists manage to elude
discovery—despite the ostentatious Maserati that Rosa has managed to borrow
from one of her wealthy clients. Only at journey’s end do we discover that the
two holy men were inspired by an inner call more mysterious and profound than the
simple whim to indulge in “the delight of being ordinary.” But… no spoiler, I!
It all sounds improbable, right? Yet Merullo manages to pull
it off, dancing nimbly through a succession of unlikely situations, from the
Pope insisting on inviting a gaudy roadside prostitute for breakfast to a night
at a costume extravaganza set in the palatial home of an aging movie star.
Worthy of Fellini at his most freakish, the scene rapidly disintegrates into a
full-blown orgy. Behind this high
comedy, though, lurks a more serious purpose—or, actually, a handful of them: a
satirical critique of contemporary culture and its materialistic values; a
study of the complexity of
Throughout, the ghostly, ghastly figure of Benito Mussolini
haunts the tale, in painful national and personal memory. He appears in Paolo’s
family history as well as in the disquieting, recurrent dreams of the (fictional)
Pope and, eventually in the actual village where the dictator was finally
hunted down and executed. He represents the spirit of greed, excess, and inhumanity
that continues to pollute our world today, in contrast with the spirit of
profound humanity personified by the two spiritual leaders. The infamous
fascist leader represents, too, the iron fist of control, whose inner grip the
narrator, Paolo, comes to acknowledge as the debilitating factor in his life as
he evolves into the unsuspected protagonist of his own tale. In what turns out
to have been Paolo’s journey of self-discovery, the two spiritual leaders are
not the guided, as he thought all along, but in fact the guides. To his
surprise, Paolo finds in himself the cause of his own suffering—and in the end,
the glimmerings, at least, of liberation.
Merullo’s book is a thoroughly enjoyable read, and one that
constantly surprises us, not only with its lively narrative twists and turns,
but also with its moments of true wisdom and compassionate insight into the
human condition along the way.
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