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A Journey with Elsa Cloud: A Mother and Daughter Odyssey Through India
A Journey with Elsa Cloud starts when Leila, the engaging narrator, receives a call from an estranged daughter who, while living in the East, has become a student of Buddhism. Leila flies to India, and together mother and daughter travel through the subcontinent on an interior and exterior journey toward understanding culminating in a visit with the Dalai Lama.
This moving mother and daughter story is enlivened by richly textured descriptions and lyrical prose.
"The best travel book I’ve ever read." -Norman Mailer
This moving mother and daughter story is enlivened by richly textured descriptions and lyrical prose.
"The best travel book I’ve ever read." -Norman Mailer
600 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1997
5 people are currently reading
65 people want to read
About the author
Leila Hadley
16 books3 followersLeila Hadley (c. 1925–2009) was an American travel writer and New York Upper East Side socialite, whose career as an author began after taking a trip around the world at twenty-six. Her books include Give Me the World (1958) and A Journey With Elsa Cloud(1997).
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
June 16, 2019
I almost gave up on this book after the first chapter. It is not so much a travel book, as it is Leila's never-ending thoughts on her relationship with her daughter, Veronica; her relationship with her mother; and her own navel gazing. I finally adjusted to this, and pressed onwards.
But then she had another annoying quirk that caused me to scan entire paragraphs, or sometimes a whole page. She never uses one word if five will do the same job. Now, I like adjectives, and descriptive phrases, but enough is enough, Leila! The moment she began describing something, I began scanning ... and I hate doing that. I enjoy reading, learning, absorbing knowledge ... scanning is none of that. I felt cheated. I've been trying to find a sentence to illustrate this, but I quickly grew tired of re-reading her descriptions, so, I've just grabbed one for you.
"For several days Holika pyres have been in preparation in all areas of New Delhi and Old Delhi - near the India Gate, in Saftarjung, just outside the railway station in Old Delhi, along the Ring Road, in Hauz Khas - surrealistic pyramids of flammables - louvered shutters, wooden cart-wheels, planks, poy frames, broken wooden chairs, jali screens - piled on top of a circular foundation of dried cow-dung patties, some the size of large casserole lids, some smaller, like the Frisbees Veronica used to throw in Central Park." pg 178
That was all one sentence! Imagine a book filled with sentences like that. I wanted to read her descriptions, but the sheer volume of her words weighed me down, and I resorted to scanning. Also, it wouldn't be so unbearable if she only did that in relation to descriptions of India, but she is equally wordy when describing some trivial memory from her childhood, etc.
The cover has a quote from Norman Mailer, "A Journey with Elsa Cloud is the best travel book I've ever read." I feel very sorry for him!
So, if you're looking for a good travel book about India, this is probably not the book for you. If you're looking to read about one woman's stream-of-consciousness burblings, you'll like this book.
I almost gave it 2 stars, but bumped it up to 3, because there were a few places in the book where she managed to talk without all of the above mentioned annoyances.
3 Stars = It was just 'okay'.
But then she had another annoying quirk that caused me to scan entire paragraphs, or sometimes a whole page. She never uses one word if five will do the same job. Now, I like adjectives, and descriptive phrases, but enough is enough, Leila! The moment she began describing something, I began scanning ... and I hate doing that. I enjoy reading, learning, absorbing knowledge ... scanning is none of that. I felt cheated. I've been trying to find a sentence to illustrate this, but I quickly grew tired of re-reading her descriptions, so, I've just grabbed one for you.
"For several days Holika pyres have been in preparation in all areas of New Delhi and Old Delhi - near the India Gate, in Saftarjung, just outside the railway station in Old Delhi, along the Ring Road, in Hauz Khas - surrealistic pyramids of flammables - louvered shutters, wooden cart-wheels, planks, poy frames, broken wooden chairs, jali screens - piled on top of a circular foundation of dried cow-dung patties, some the size of large casserole lids, some smaller, like the Frisbees Veronica used to throw in Central Park." pg 178
That was all one sentence! Imagine a book filled with sentences like that. I wanted to read her descriptions, but the sheer volume of her words weighed me down, and I resorted to scanning. Also, it wouldn't be so unbearable if she only did that in relation to descriptions of India, but she is equally wordy when describing some trivial memory from her childhood, etc.
The cover has a quote from Norman Mailer, "A Journey with Elsa Cloud is the best travel book I've ever read." I feel very sorry for him!
So, if you're looking for a good travel book about India, this is probably not the book for you. If you're looking to read about one woman's stream-of-consciousness burblings, you'll like this book.
I almost gave it 2 stars, but bumped it up to 3, because there were a few places in the book where she managed to talk without all of the above mentioned annoyances.
3 Stars = It was just 'okay'.
January 26, 2009
My mother gave me this a few years ago. I hated it with a passion - and stopped reading - one of maybe 3 books I have ever given up on. Self-absorbed, self-indulgent, shoddily-written and dull, dull, dull.
May 9, 2012
A lot of beautiful descriptions but the tangents got a little tiresome. The passages where she tries to relate to her daughter are interesting, unfortunately, one can't help but read them in the context of the allegations brought against Hadley and her last husband.
August 16, 2013
I am finally, finally, finally, finally done with this book! I have never been so glad to finish a book. The daughter that the author travels through India with accuses her mother of blithering. I concur! 600 pages of blithering on and on.
She writes well, but just too much. She uses numerous adjectives to describe things, and she wants to describe near everything. She wants to tell us about India and it's mythology and holidays, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikh religion, her Protestant background, her grandmother, mother, daughter Veronica (the one who lives in India and that she is traveling with), the 1960's, her marriages particularly her marriage to Veronica's father.
I read parts of this book out loud to keep myself from falling asleep over it. One of my kids thought it was a book of poetry, my youngest said I should sue the author but I had to explain that I was reading it of my own free will and the author was dead. Here is an example of the excessive adjective use and going on and on that I am trying to explain to you,
"Frogs, bringers of rain, bringers of life, worshiped by the Maya. But to me the monks's chanting- this humming roar, this roaring hum- sounds more like the wind, the rumble of rocks, the thunder, an avalanche, a volcano, fumaroles, geysers, waterfalls - like all, yet precisely like no one of these. The sound vibrates, pulses, contracts and expands in my mind as though I were part of the systole and diastole of the beginning of creation. It is a pulsing, flooding darkness of sound- thick, deep, heavy, old, warm, profound - a sound that combines with the split of the voice into the light, high, thin, sound of whistling, a sustained note from some unknown instrument, like the pipes of Pan must have sounded."
This is not the end of the description of the sound of the monk's chanting either. The above paragraph continues for another 1/2 page. All of this description brought on by her daughter's simple statement "I love the sounds of the monks. They sound like bull-frogs."
It IS good writing (although I don't know who Pan is or what his pipes must have sounded like) but it is too much! 600 pages of this!
Also, there are some dark suspicions over this author's life. She was accused by another daughter of child sexual abuse along with the author's 5th husband. The daughter she was traveling with in this book was extremely promiscuous by the age of 13 and was, from what I understand, a runaway by age 15.
Regarding this; I have to wonder why any mother would detail for the world her daughter's promiscuity. It is a very sad thing for the girl and her family but made so much worse by publishing it for the world! And the mother's judgment, by her own statements, was iffy at best. She tells us about an incident where a boyfriend (her husband has left the family) tells her, in front of 13 year old Veronica, that she has a pubic hair in her teeth. Leila (the author) thinks this is hysterical. She tells of another incident where a boyfriend (maybe the same one?) tells her, again in Veronica's presence, that he wants "her" pointing to Veronica. The mother does not take this seriously.
These incidents scream poor judgment in my opinion. The danger sirens should have been going off. Can we blame the 1960's for this?
Even though personally I don't find India to be a source of spiritual inspiration I can see why Leila's daughter went in search of something outside of her family to find meaning in. The mother spends the time in India searching to reconnect with her daughter. I don't know if she succeeded in that as every story told as "the truth" is somewhat untrue, even if just because it is filtered through the mind and words of the teller. There is some sort of applicable quote in this book, regarding this,
"She (Veronica) says that in the code of the Bodhisattva, the meaning of life is to bring happiness to others, that later, when meditation has made one understand that the world as one sees it is one's own fabrication, the purpose of living to be good for another also dissolves. "One is naturally, appropriately good, with no motive for it." "
My final feeling regarding this book is just a vast relief that I have finished reading it. Although I like the Bodhisattva thought above there was much mythology, psycho-babble and "guru-gobble" that I tried to read with comprehension through my boredom. Erudite but not, personally for me, edifying.
She writes well, but just too much. She uses numerous adjectives to describe things, and she wants to describe near everything. She wants to tell us about India and it's mythology and holidays, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikh religion, her Protestant background, her grandmother, mother, daughter Veronica (the one who lives in India and that she is traveling with), the 1960's, her marriages particularly her marriage to Veronica's father.
I read parts of this book out loud to keep myself from falling asleep over it. One of my kids thought it was a book of poetry, my youngest said I should sue the author but I had to explain that I was reading it of my own free will and the author was dead. Here is an example of the excessive adjective use and going on and on that I am trying to explain to you,
"Frogs, bringers of rain, bringers of life, worshiped by the Maya. But to me the monks's chanting- this humming roar, this roaring hum- sounds more like the wind, the rumble of rocks, the thunder, an avalanche, a volcano, fumaroles, geysers, waterfalls - like all, yet precisely like no one of these. The sound vibrates, pulses, contracts and expands in my mind as though I were part of the systole and diastole of the beginning of creation. It is a pulsing, flooding darkness of sound- thick, deep, heavy, old, warm, profound - a sound that combines with the split of the voice into the light, high, thin, sound of whistling, a sustained note from some unknown instrument, like the pipes of Pan must have sounded."
This is not the end of the description of the sound of the monk's chanting either. The above paragraph continues for another 1/2 page. All of this description brought on by her daughter's simple statement "I love the sounds of the monks. They sound like bull-frogs."
It IS good writing (although I don't know who Pan is or what his pipes must have sounded like) but it is too much! 600 pages of this!
Also, there are some dark suspicions over this author's life. She was accused by another daughter of child sexual abuse along with the author's 5th husband. The daughter she was traveling with in this book was extremely promiscuous by the age of 13 and was, from what I understand, a runaway by age 15.
Regarding this; I have to wonder why any mother would detail for the world her daughter's promiscuity. It is a very sad thing for the girl and her family but made so much worse by publishing it for the world! And the mother's judgment, by her own statements, was iffy at best. She tells us about an incident where a boyfriend (her husband has left the family) tells her, in front of 13 year old Veronica, that she has a pubic hair in her teeth. Leila (the author) thinks this is hysterical. She tells of another incident where a boyfriend (maybe the same one?) tells her, again in Veronica's presence, that he wants "her" pointing to Veronica. The mother does not take this seriously.
These incidents scream poor judgment in my opinion. The danger sirens should have been going off. Can we blame the 1960's for this?
Even though personally I don't find India to be a source of spiritual inspiration I can see why Leila's daughter went in search of something outside of her family to find meaning in. The mother spends the time in India searching to reconnect with her daughter. I don't know if she succeeded in that as every story told as "the truth" is somewhat untrue, even if just because it is filtered through the mind and words of the teller. There is some sort of applicable quote in this book, regarding this,
"She (Veronica) says that in the code of the Bodhisattva, the meaning of life is to bring happiness to others, that later, when meditation has made one understand that the world as one sees it is one's own fabrication, the purpose of living to be good for another also dissolves. "One is naturally, appropriately good, with no motive for it." "
My final feeling regarding this book is just a vast relief that I have finished reading it. Although I like the Bodhisattva thought above there was much mythology, psycho-babble and "guru-gobble" that I tried to read with comprehension through my boredom. Erudite but not, personally for me, edifying.
January 12, 2012
The book is annoying with its chattering on about mythology and psychology. It is saved by the good description of the mother's attempts to relate to her adult daughter.
March 28, 2013
Couldn't get past her never ending descriptions and her constant fretting over her inferiority to her own daughter
March 22, 2018
I wanted to like this memoir—the author is a beautiful writer—but a third into it, the author was still whining, wasting good words on her dysfunctional relationship with her daughter. I wanted what Norman Mailer promised, "the best travel book" about India, where I was reading this book. But the author kept falling back on obsessing about her daughter and these ponderous punctuations deadened what truly might have been a good travel memoir (An editor might have told her so). When writing about place--Dharamsala or Tibet, Hadley is almost beyond reproach with her tantalizing descriptions and her knowledge of cultures. She does have a tendency to bog down with laundry lists of items and to use words the reader might never see again. For example, "agenbite" (p. 162) --I'll let you look it up. Hadley was privileged, a NY socialite, with a love-hate relationship with her own money, married twice, five or six kids, respected journalist. Apparently her daughter, Veronica (aka Elsa Cloud) renounced the memoir and the book left me wishing to hear her side of this wearisome dysfunction. Where art thou, Veronica?
July 19, 2023
2.5 stars
March 9, 2017
The parts about India in the 1970s were brilliant, but there was so much dreary self-indulgent material about the author's family history which I felt lagged and needed a good edit. I got into a habit of skim-reading these parts.
November 7, 2014
One of my favorite travel books. Yes, the relationship between mother and daughter can be a bit wearisome at times but isn't that always the case? Traveling with someone, even (or perhaps especially) someone dear to you can be difficult. I love how the author uses this trip to explore both her future (how will she relate to her daughter's independence? What comes next in her own life) and her past (what was she like as a young woman? How die she become the woman she is now?) in this present exploration of India, an entirely fascinating character in her own right.
A description of both outer and inner landscapes, Travels with Elsa Cloud is a book that will transport you.
A description of both outer and inner landscapes, Travels with Elsa Cloud is a book that will transport you.
Read
March 12, 2016The author journeys to India to reconnect with her wayward, increasingly estranged daughter, Veronica, who has seemingly (though superficially, if one is to judge by her actions & reactions) adopted Tibetan Buddhism. This is a travel book, but quite distinct in the genre as it as much about the journey of a mother and grown-up daughter striving to find a point of reconnection. Hadley is remarkably erudite and articulate; her knowledge and stories are fascinating adjuncts to what she sees and hears. Her insatiable curiosity is addictive and compels the narrative forward. A must-read for anyone visiting India.
August 1, 2023
If I ever have to make a list of my 10 favorites, this will be on it. The paperback, bought in the long-gone Madison Avenue Bookshop, traveled with me while I traversed some of the same territory. Now, even though I haven't left NYC in years, it stands up to rereading.
It makes me wish that I had never heard anything about Hadley's personal life (https://archive.vanityfair.com/articl...).
It makes me wish that I had never heard anything about Hadley's personal life (https://archive.vanityfair.com/articl...).
August 17, 2007
I loved this book, particularly because of the mother perspective. I read it when I was only a daughter. It would be interesting to reread it now that I'm a mother too. But it's also one of the most beautiful accounts of travel in India that I've come across. That, and poignant humor too. Lovely.
Currently reading
October 12, 2009This is the second or third time I've read this amazing book about a mother's travels in India with her grown daughter. The way that Leila Hadley describes India makes me feel like I am right there and the mother/daughter thing ressonates with me. This may be my favorite book of all.
August 31, 2013
I did not finish this book. the writer was, to my admittedly limited knowledge about goodness, people in general and her specifically, a horrible and not-good person. that matters in an autobiographical work, or it does to me. your mileage may vary.
Want to read
August 17, 2007recommended by Sunni
December 27, 2007
Heavy on descriptions, but chock full of good stuff. A mother remembers much about her relationship with her daughter, and they journey to India to kind of get it together.
March 16, 2008
Wonderful travel book. The writing was lovely.
October 17, 2011
This made me want to go to India so badly. The writing makes you see, taste, smell it. Some parts felt a little pretentious, but overall it was beautiful.
May 27, 2012
I grew tired of this wealthy woman's recitation of her family past. Narcissism?
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews