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The Elephanta Suite Paperback – September 18, 2008
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This startling, far-reaching book captures the tumult, ambition, hardship, and serenity that mark today’s India. Theroux’s Westerners risk venturing far beyond the subcontinent’s well-worn paths to discover woe or truth or peace. A middle-aged couple on vacation veers heedlessly from idyll to chaos. A buttoned-up Boston lawyer finds succor in Mumbai’s reeking slums. And a young woman befriends an elephant in Bangalore.
We also meet Indian characters as singular as they are reflective of the country’s subtle ironies: an executive who yearns to become a holy beggar, an earnest young striver whose personality is rewired by acquiring an American accent, a miracle-working guru, and others.
As ever, Theroux’s portraits of people and places explode stereotypes to exhilarating effect. The Elephanta Suite urges us toward a fresh, compelling, and often inspiring notion of what India is, and what it can do to those who try to lose—or find—themselves there.
- Print length288 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherMariner Books
- Publication dateSeptember 18, 2008
- Dimensions5.5 x 0.67 x 8.25 inches
- ISBN-100547086024
- ISBN-13978-0547086026
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Editorial Reviews
Review
-- "Sunday Times "(U.K.)
"A masterful and mesmerizing storyteller."
--" Booklist
""There is very little that Paul Theroux cannot fit on to a page. . . . His writing skills are disciplined and muscular, his ear as finely tuned as a musician's, his eye sharper than any razor. . . ."
--" Daily Mail"
"From the Hardcover edition."
About the Author
PAUL THEROUX is the author of many highly acclaimed books. His novels include The Bad Angel Brothers, The Lower River, Jungle Lovers, and The Mosquito Coast, and his renowned travel books include Ghost Train to the Eastern Star and Dark Star Safari. He lives in Hawaii and on Cape Cod.
Product details
- Publisher : Mariner Books; Reprint edition (September 18, 2008)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 288 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0547086024
- ISBN-13 : 978-0547086026
- Item Weight : 9.7 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.5 x 0.67 x 8.25 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,803,350 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #5,587 in Cultural Heritage Fiction
- #15,148 in Coming of Age Fiction (Books)
- #18,929 in Short Stories Anthologies
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Paul Theroux was born and educated in the United States. After graduating from university in 1963, he travelled first to Italy and then to Africa, where he worked as a Peace Corps teacher at a bush school in Malawi, and as a lecturer at Makerere University in Uganda. In 1968 he joined the University of Singapore and taught in the Department of English for three years. Throughout this time he was publishing short stories and journalism, and wrote a number of novels. Among these were Fong and the Indians, Girls at Play and Jungle Lovers, all of which appear in one volume, On the Edge of the Great Rift (Penguin, 1996).
In the early 1970s Paul Theroux moved with his wife and two children to Dorset, where he wrote Saint Jack, and then on to London. He was a resident in Britain for a total of seventeen years. In this time he wrote a dozen volumes of highly praised fiction and a number of successful travel books, from which a selection of writings were taken to compile his book Travelling the World (Penguin, 1992). Paul Theroux has now returned to the United States, but he continues to travel widely.
Paul Theroux's many books include Picture Palace, which won the 1978 Whitbread Literary Award; The Mosquito Coast, which was the 1981 Yorkshire Post Novel of the Year and joint winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was also made into a feature film; Riding the Iron Rooster, which won the 1988 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award; The Pillars of Hercules, shortlisted for the 1996 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award; My Other Life: A Novel, Kowloon Tong, Sir Vidia's Shadow, Fresh-air Fiend and Hotel Honolulu. Blindness is his latest novel. Most of his books are published by Penguin.
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In three, roughly 80-page mininovels, Theroux doesn't give us the sanitized Merchant-and-Ivory India. He doesn't give us the tidy India of best-selling contemporary novels. Rather, he exposes us to the real underbelly of Indian culture. This is an India of pleading beggars, teenage prostitutes, weirdly comic salesmen, and people so pompous they are like parodies. Most of all, this is an India where poor people are as abundant as fleas and virtually every one will do almost anything to get one tiny step ahead.
Each of the novellas deals with American travelers. The stories are superficially interlaced. These travelers are in India at approximately the same time. In odd ways, their paths cross. It is amusing to discover these completely unimportant connections, so I won't say any more. If you discover them, pat yourself on the back and know that you are a careful reader. If you miss them, don't worry: these connections are of absolutely no importance.
The first novella, "Monkey Hill," tells the tale of a wealthy American couple who vacation in India at a luxury retreat. They only see the real India from the window of their limousine as they are rushed from the airport to their lush hilltop health-spa retreat. Through brief sexual encounters with two startlingly beautiful young people working at the resort, the wife and husband are each introduced separately to the other India--the hovel of a small rural village located completely out-of-sight within walking distance from the resort. Little do they realize that the village is currently a hotbed of Hindu-Muslim cultural and religious strife, a power-keg just waiting to go off.
The second novella, "The Gateway of India," is about one of those American businessmen who give global business and America travelers a well-deserved bad reputation. This man is everything an American in India shouldn't be. At first completely terrified by India's alien culture, the businessman hides in his hotel eating canned food and drinking purified water. By chance he is catapulted into the other India, and falls in love with the new, sexually liberated person he becomes. In the end, this story has an interesting twist that you won't see coming.
The last novella, "The Elephant God," deals with a young female Ivy-League backpacker. Idealistically, she ends up living in a religious retreat, loving every moment of it. She thinks it's free, and plays with the idea of living there forever. Her Indian roommates subtly make it known to her that she needs to donate a substantial sum of money each month to help pay for her living costs. So she finds a job at a global call center training workers to mimic an everyday American accent and style of speech. All goes well until a call-center worker takes an unwanted interest in her and starts stalking her.
I am an outrageously prolific reader, but this is the first set of novellas that I have every purchased. I was surprised at how delighted I was with these three mininovels. If this were a novel, I might have read it in one day--the experience was that compelling. But because these were novellas, I purposefully stopped myself after each one and thought about the tale for a day or two before going on to the next. These stories have intellectual depth that makes it easy to think about them long after you've finished the tale.
I highly recommend this work. In fact, I can't wait to pack up my copy and send it to my brother. He was the one who enthusiastically recommended Theroux's " The Mosquito Coast " to me some 25 years ago. Now I can earnestly return the favor!
The second novella is also beautifully written but more interesting and complex than the other two novellas. It could be considered a masterpiece. The main character is tortured as are so many Theroux protagonists and his relationship with the Indian culture is mirrored and played off of his own internal conflicts seamlessly. Whether to dominate, integrate, cooperate or lapse into narcissism leads the main character to a gently ruinous end. The conflicts are his own and at the same time they are projected onto the Indian culture leading us to feel by the end of the novel that we understand some of the crosscurrents and contradictions of both.
The third novella is in the voice of a woman who explores India and winds up disillusioned and injured. The plot is somewhat linier and although the writing is beautiful, a woman’s tragic fall from virtue is a perhaps too familiar plotline. There are several subthemes but they feel a little contrived.
Overall this collection is worth reading. The second novella really shines and Theroux shows us a typically varied and insightful picture of the Indian culture. India comes off badly.
Elephants pervade the stories. The Elephanta Suite of the title is a suite in a luxury hotel in Mumbai. It's presumably named after the Elephanta Caves on an island in Mumbai harbour, which once had a huge statue of an elephant outside them (it's now in a museum in the city). The elephant is Ganesha, the Remover of Obstacles - the symbolism is clear enough, but not obtrusive (you don't actually need to know this in order to enjoy the book). The businessman of the centre story stays in the Elephanta Suite (his cocoon), eating tinned tuna and looking out the window, unwilling to commit himself to the city. But eventually he does, and so begins the story that takes him to the ashram. The girl of the final story also has an elephant in her life, a real one - and this elephant does indeed remove an obstacle for her. The businessman finds peace in the ashram, but the girl comes out of the ashram (a different one) and finds a different, possibly more lasting, peace. And the couple of the first story have no elephant at all - they have Hanuman the monkey instead, who has a reputation for violence.
Another theme is sensuality. The couple of the first story are in health spa somewhere in the mountains. They try to find sensual adventure with the spa staff, and fail, with disastrous consequences. The businessman, because he is more respectful of Indians, suffers no such disaster, but instead eventually sees through the shallowness of sensuality. For the girl of the final story it's not her own sensuality that provides the problem. (Sensuality, by the way, is bound up with violence and betrayal in all three stories).
At a more basic level, the narrative in the central and last stories move forward much better than that of the first - I think Theroux might have had a problem, in that all three stories had to be about the same length, but as each extends the reach of the one before, there really wasn't enough to say in the first story, and it does tend to drag at times. The characters are believable (anyone who has visited India will recognise these people), and India itself comes alive.
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Après 5 voyages j'adore.
Indeed, Theroux has an anthropologist’s eye and is an expert at scribbling about places foreign. One of his recurring themes is: you don’t change your destination; it changes you, often darkly. And that’s more or less what happens in the three stories. In ‘Monkey Hill,’ a rich American couple head to a spa retreat only to drift apart after they each become infatuated with their personal groomers. In ‘The Gateway of India,’ the most sordid of the stories, an American businessman undergoes, without giving too much away, a profound spiritual metamorphosis, while his local counterpart becomes, shall we say, more familiar with American culture. What occurs is a cultural exchange, but not the sort you might imagine. In the ‘Elephant God,’ a young American woman heads to an ashram and has a fatalistic encounter with a seemingly friendly local, a meeting that changes her life.
Paul Theroux does many things well, but he might be best at transporting you to faraway places. You see the smoky haze over the town, smell the elephant dung in the courtyard, and practically feel the grot and grime of the lurid alleys in Mumbai. The Elephanta Suite is a visceral and vivid experience, a delightful little book. How strange it didn’t seem to receive much attention.
Troy Parfitt is the author of War Torn: Adventures in the Brave New Canada and Why China Will Never Rule the World