Better to Have Gone

Love, Death, and the Quest for Utopia in Auroville

By: Akash Kapur

Narrated by: Vikas Adam

Length: 12 hrs and 38 mins

Publisher's summary

Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CNN, New Statesman, Air Mail, and more

A “haunting and elegant” (The Wall Street Journal) story about love, faith, the search for utopia - and the often devastating cost of idealism.

It’s the late 1960s, and two lovers converge on an arid patch of earth in South India. John Walker is the handsome scion of a powerful East-Coast American family. Diane Maes is a beautiful hippie from Belgium. They have come to build a new world - Auroville, an international utopian community for thousands of people. Their faith is strong, the future bright.

So how do John and Diane end up dying two decades later, on the same day, on a cracked concrete floor in a thatch hut by a remote canyon? This is the mystery Akash Kapur sets out to solve in Better to Have Gone, and it carries deep personal resonance: Diane and John were the parents of Akash’s wife, Auralice. Akash and Auralice grew up in Auroville; like the rest of their community, they never really understood those deaths.

In 2004, Akash and Auralice return to Auroville from New York, where they have been living with John’s family. As they reestablish themselves in the community, along with their two sons, they must confront the ghosts of those distant deaths. Slowly, they come to understand how the tragic individual fates of John and Diane intersected with the collective history of their town.

“A riveting account of human aspiration and folly taken to extremes” (The Boston Globe), Better to Have Gone probes the underexplored yet universal idea of utopia and portrays in vivid detail the daily life of one such community. Richly atmospheric and filled with remarkable characters, spread across time and continents, this is narrative writing of the highest order - a “gripping…compelling…[and] heartbreaking story, deeply researched and lucidly told” (The New York Times Book Review).

©2021 Akash Kapur. All rights reserved (P)2021 Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved

beautifully written, beautifully read

fascinating story of a quest for utopia. the reader's sensitivity to the text is the best I've experienced yet on Audible.

Intelligent, sensitive well written book

Very thoughtfully written portrait of a complex couple and community. Fascinating tale of people trying to build a utopia. The author is uniquely vantaged to tell this story and he does it with honesty and insight.
Very well read.

Superb

I loved this story. Deeply moving, thoughtful, well researched, beautiful description, and insightful into alternative living communities and the spiritual/philosophical quandaries that surround them.

Memoir of Auroville

Westerners don’t often have the privilege of being immersed in the work of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother. Satprem was Mother’s scribe, and to be able to experience from another generation the story of this new magnificent embodiment of human evolution is a worthwhile investment of time.
At times the narrative is a bit too intimate and personal, although it softens as it describes the 50th anniversary of Auroville —an experiment for human cooperation.

Narcissists go hungry in India

If you support every type of cult, you might like this book. Hunger, wearing rags, living in huts, refusing medical care, building a temple to the leader and mooching off wealthy relatives will not build a better world. Don’t waste your brain on this train wreck.

Thank Mother I’m finished

Boring, boring, boring, but I’m too stubborn to give up on a book. The interesting parts of this book could have been told in about 10 minutes.

Boring narration and writing

This should have been an interesting story. There is too much unnecessary detail and the reader delivers in a monotone. I couldn’t make it even half way through. I am disappointed that I wasted a credit on this book.

A silly book

A silly book about a silly city of self centered silly people spouting silly new age nonsense. A dumb book about a dumb idea by someone who thinks this minor event has any consequence. Silly.