Now Is The Time To Open Your Heart (2004) - Plot & Excerpts
This is my first Alice Walker novel, so my expectations might have been a bit too high. I think if it had been a first novel from a new author, I would have been pleasantly surprised, but when I picked this one up I was kind of hoping for a dazzling work from a master author late in her career.I liked reading a novel about a woman who is over 40, unmarried, black, confident, and not yearning for a romantic relationship. It seems rare to read about an older woman on a quest outside of chicklit or romance, and I was thankful for that.However, the novel on its own was just okay for me. I am interested in quests, spiritual awakenings, and consciousness-altering experiences, but I found the novel's loose structure (I didn't easily follow the jumps through time and location) and lack of focus to be confusing. The novel felt ethereal and abstract, which was worse when some of the story was told through a dream or a parable. I found myself wanting more detail about people's lives and experiences, but the text hovered in a meta space, describing each character's spiritual revelation without giving me much to hold onto about the character him/herself. As one reviewer commented, "Every character has an epiphany on pretty much every page." And after the epiphany, we generally don't see that character again: it turns out they were arguments for the novel's philosophical point more than they were characters.It's hard to even say if Kate is transformed over the course of the novel because we don't know her at the beginning and we don't know much more about her at the end. Overall, it had the effect of a poem that didn't connect, and I got the sense that while she was writing this, Walker wasn't that interested in writing a novel. At points the book felt like it was trying very hard to be wise, and I would rather have received its wisdom through the story than directly (mostly from the shaman Armando). The novel repeatedly tries to push individual insights (such as that Rick's spiritual pain comes from his family history of selling addictive street drugs to black people) into the framework of the novel's argument, which is that our disconnection with the spiritual world (called "grandmother" throughout) has led to the moral depravity of our culture and the suffering of the most vulnerable. I'm not sure how this applied to Kate, who is not vulnerable, or even particularly in need of wisdom at the beginning of the novel. She is already out of the relationship that she felt was suffocating her and into a new one, and she is apparently completely free of responsibilities in her life like childcare or employment. She doesn't seem to be in any type of crisis, so she doesn't seem to have a reason for taking a break from her life to go on an Amazonian spiritual retreat. But like I said, we don't really get to know her. Maybe she just felt compelled?Overall, I found it hard to connect with this book enough to like it. I think I would have preferred an essay from Walker on why we should collectively embrace native Peruvian approaches to nature and spiritual in order to heal ourselves. By framing that idea in a novel I felt she was trying to cover the argument -- which is what she really wanted to talk about -- with fiction, and it felt dishonest. I'm open to a discussion of what we can learn from how other cultures maintain spiritual and ethical balance, and I'm even open to hearing that argument in the form of a novel, but I felt like in this case the novel was neglected in favor of making a point. Even when the book was putting forward ideas that I agreed with, I felt like I was being told what to think, not to open my heart.
Reading this book was, well, an interesting experience. The author's world view is very different from my own, so I would be inclined to interpret things quite differently from the way she interprets them.For example, here's an excerpt taken from pages 67-68:"And, said Kate [the main character] into Anunu's [a shaman Kate was opening up to] silence, there is the question of sex. One's sexuality."Ah, said Anunu."I don't seem to find much of a difference between women and men when it comes to loving them. If they're wonderful, sexy, and cute, I want to snuggle up and be enchanted."They both laughed."Well, said Anunu. That's not a problem. The other two [issues previously mentioned by Kate] might be, but that's not."I don't think so either, said Kate. I don't understand why people have such a hard time seeing it's impossible to be only one thing; and to love only one gender or one race. At least it seems impossible to me. It would be like thinking only beautiful people have green eyes. Limitation is willful and childish, she said, And so much less fun."Kate is a 57-year-old black woman who has been married many times, sometimes to a man and sometimes to a woman. In the author's view, she has lived a life rich with explorations into the natural world and the human soul. Her explorations consist, in part at least, of experiences with Grandmother, a spiritual being of ancient origin who counsels with Kate during sessions when she is under the influence of yagé, a hallucinogenic drug.Since I am a Christian, most, if not all, of the foregoing is contrary to how one's life should be lived. On the other hand, Kate also shows great compassion for others, and this I can relate to. So I have mixed feelings about the value of this book as anything other than a window into the thoughts and beliefs of a popular non-Christian feminist, or, perhaps preferred by Walker, womanist.
What do You think about Now Is The Time To Open Your Heart (2004)?
This was a good book, but not great.. I appreciated the journeys that Kate took and her desire to reconnect with spirit.. I sort of got the impression that this story may be somewhat autobiographical. When I pictured Kate in my mind, I saw Alice. Most of us can’t take a trip down the Colorado River or a trip into the rainforest of the Amazon, so it’s nice to go along with Alice as she makes her journey. The novel is indeed dream-like and is almost a parable instead of a novel. Her writing style verges on stream of consciousness; she doesn’t use quotation marks to indicate dialogue but you don’t really need them. The only part that disappointed me was the ending. It has to do with a corporation that wants to patent yage. It raises good questions, but it seemed to come from nowhere and was just sort of stuck on as an afterthought. From BooklistKate, a successful author fearful of aging and uncertain about continuing her relationship with Yolo, an artist, sets off on a journey of spiritual discovery. She has been profoundly unhappy for some time, dreaming of rivers, until she takes off for rivers--the Colorado and the Amazon. Among strangers, Kate is able to distance herself from her life and her relationship. Yolo, on his own separate journey, meets a former lover, a Hawaiian woman now overweight and weighed down with the recent loss of her son to a drug overdose and a sense that she--like her son--has lost her way. Kate finds growing intimacy among a group of disparate souls who unburden themselves of their pasts under the influence of yage, a South American medicinal herb. Kate finds that the herb allows her to reveal her innermost secrets and puts her in touch with the elders. Despite their frictions, Kate and Yolo have similar reawakenings about the land as mother, overcoming personal and ethnic oppression, and dismantling barriers between the sexes, the races, and young and old. Walker's dreamlike novel incorporates the political and spiritual consciousness and emotional style for which she is known and appreciated. Vanessa Bush
—Holli
As I read this book, I kept thinking, "Wait, Alice Walker is one of our great American writers, right? What am I missing?" To the extent that there's a plot, it's about a couple who take separate vacations: she to an Amazonian meditation retreat where everyone takes some kind of hallucinogen they call "Grandmother"; he to Hawaii, where he lands in a consciousness-raising circle that raises his consciousness about everything from processed food to the history of transgender shamans. My tolerance for New Age anything is fairly low, and for all the factoids about oppressed peoples that Walker tosses in, her main characters are well-adjusted Americans who live off their art, can afford fancy retreats and don't have any problems that aren't solved immediately. The latter was my real issue with this novel: Every character has an epiphany on pretty much every page. The protagonist learns in a dream that she's afraid of growing old, and that she shouldn't be. Except she'd been prancing around loving her gray hair up until that point, so it was hardly rewarding to see a resolution to a problem I didn't know existed. I'm sure it's really eye-opening and life-changing to go on a rain forest retreat. Not so much to read about one.
—Cheryl Klein
A very thought-provoking book by the Pulitzer prize winning author, Alice Walker. The main character of the story, Kate, has lived through various challenges in life and this is her journey to find answers and meaning to life which includes travelling to the Amazon where shamans introduce her to learning more about herself. Her journey includes understanding her personal history and the persecution of her ancestors. She discovers that hatred of her people and other cultures, to the point of willfully obliterating other peoples, is driven by fear. As is pointed out, "What needs killing is not the person; what needs killing is the idea that torturing another person will create happiness." The story touches on dignity, self-respect and accepting differences. Another aspect of Kate's story involves understanding her life better and a realization of an underlying fear of her aging process. As she discovers, "age is power" rather than being afraid of growing older. She comes to a realization that in many aspects of life, one needs to deal with fears by embracing them which can liberate the soul from the negative realities of life and, instead, allow one to open their heart to see the wonders of reality and life.
—Karen Hays
