Overland — David Gilbert

The youth from wealthy nations made the trip overland to India in the late sixties with the expectation of having experiences there that they could not have in their home countries -- adventure, wonder and excitement. Domestic unrest, the banality of pursuing a career with the five o'clock cocktail and the war in VietNam helped spawn hippies who were only too happy to leave. The stories in Overland are a remembered and reinvented record of that time with at least one real character and event in each story. Dave, the narrator in most stories, variously: falls in with hippy thieves, works as a paid companion for an anxious professor, suffers consequences from a Rajneesh instruction to a disciple, is abused by an artist who is attempting to draw the sprawling Ganges, learns of the impending Indian atomic bomb, receives testimony of the lasting influence of a Billy Graham rally in Calcutta, has an affair with Ringo Star's secretary, and smokes opium during an opium-den stakeout to catch a hippy grifter. Dave takes a break as the narrator for two stories: in one a careless hippy narrowly avoids a fatwa and in another a small boy is all but abandoned and sent to find his father in the Himalayas.At the end of his stay in India, Dave has to decide if he will accept an invitation to continue partying in London or return broke and live with his Rapture-crazed mother. He doesn't know that later in life he will return to India as an amateur photographer assigned to take pictures of his dead meditation teacher for ten consecutive days until the corpse is burned. It is an undertaking with an ending that fulfills its purpose.Reviews for my book of stories, I Shot The Hairdresser.The deadpan tone of I Shot The Hairdresser resonates profoundly with the shell-shocked pre- & post-Generation Xers. Each short story is highly filmable. Brilliant work, impossible to stop reading. Susan Smith Nash TAPROOT REVIEWS 7/8Kafka came to mind right away because of Gilbert's little piece called Penal Colony. If I were an English teacher, I would anthologize it right next to its famous namesake.Gerald Burns, Another Chicago Magazine (28)