Aama’s-Eye View of America

Manjushree Thapa is the author of eight books of fiction and nonfiction, and has produced several works of literary translation. Her essays and editorials have appeared in the New York Times, the London Review of Books, the Globe and Mail and elsewhere. Her latest novel is All of Us in Our Own Lives.

Published on

Aama in America: Pilgrimage of the Heart

by Broughton

Coburn

Anchor/Doubleday

New York

May 1995

ISBN 0 385 47417 2

Broughton Coburn's Aama in America is the tantalising follow-up to Nepali Aama (1982), his lyrical text-and-photo portrait of the woman from Syangja, Vishnu Maya Gurung. Aama in America is the chronicle of octogenarian Vishnu Maya's unlikely pilgrimage to the United States. In addition to being a portrait of the United States—as seen through Vishnu Maya's displaced but perceptive eye—the book is also the story of the author's relationship with Vishnu Maya (who is his dharma mother), and with his natural mother whose death left him with troubled, unresolved emotions, and with his girlfriend, to whom he is not sure he wants to commit. The book has a large and wide-ranging premise which Coburn tries to resolve, sometimes erratically but mostly engagingly, over a journey that starts in Syangja and goes through the Tokyo airport lounge on to Seattle, Washington, California, Maine, Montana, Washington DC, New York and back to Nepal.

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