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The Elephanta Suite
A master of the travel narrative weaves three intertwined novellas of Westerners transformed by their sojourns in India.
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.
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.
274 pages, Hardcover
First published September 26, 2007
147 people are currently reading
958 people want to read
About the author
Paul Theroux
238 books2,605 followersPaul Edward Theroux is an American travel writer and novelist, whose best known work is The Great Railway Bazaar (1975), a travelogue about a trip he made by train from Great Britain through Western and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, through South Asia, then South-East Asia, up through East Asia, as far east as Japan, and then back across Russia to his point of origin. Although perhaps best known as a travelogue writer, Theroux has also published numerous works of fiction, some of which were made into feature films. He was awarded the 1981 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel The Mosquito Coast.
He is the father of Marcel and Louis Theroux, and the brother of Alexander and Peter. Justin Theroux is his nephew.
He is the father of Marcel and Louis Theroux, and the brother of Alexander and Peter. Justin Theroux is his nephew.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 247 reviews
December 24, 2019
Great read!
Read
April 10, 2009Dissecting India with discommoding success
Unqualified praise is but one response to any work by master stylist Paul Theroux for he is able to provoke, infuriate, annoy, anger, rile, stimulate and eventually persuade with equal facility.
His latest book, “The Elephanta Suite” sets out to slice through myriad and complex cultural layers that make up India. He does it with discommoding success. Mind you, a lot of what he says about India through his protagonists can be construed as an unabashed attempt to raise the reader’s heckles. In the end, one is not even sure whether he loves India or despises it. But that is the whole point of the book. It is impossible to distil India down to a neat and intellectually edifying formulation. Theroux approaches India as a mature adult who does not believe in wasting time on politeness as a device to strike up a quick yet shallow relationship with an ancient and baffling civilization. He treats India, at any rate India as it is now, as a robust civilization that can take many hits from a rancid critic in the right spirit without losing its inherent greatness.
With this slim volume of three novellas Theroux proves yet again his unremitting brilliance as a contriver of outstanding prose. He writes with incisive skills rarely, if ever, seen in a Western writer about India. He uses language both as a surgeon’s scalpel and a blacksmith’s sledgehammer. One cannot escape the feeling that the underlying emotion surviving after his protagonists are scarred by their encounters with India is profound unhappiness. Be it the deeply unresolved couple, Beth and Audie Blunden, deeply unsatisfied “lawyer and moneyman” Dwight Huntsinger or deeply distressed traveler Alice, they all come across as fundamentally unhappy souls who are in the country by choice or otherwise in search of something transforming only to be swindled by the crafty modern/ancient India.
It is immediately obvious to the reader that Theroux is an astute observer. Right from something as trivial as using many different Indian names in this 274-page book to the more complex social and cultural undercurrents of a society pulled in contradictory directions by its history and its modernity Theroux gets the details right. Not that I have read a great deal but I am willing to stick my neck out, and perhaps make a fool of myself, and say that he is the first Western writer to have grasped modern/ancient India so well.
In a particular passage in the last novella “The Elephant God” he writes: “Now ‘utterance’ was one of those words, like ‘miscreants’, ‘audacious’, ‘thrice’, ‘ample’ and ‘jocundity’ that some Indians used in casual conversation and Indian writers used in sentences, in the same way out the window the Indian farmers were using antique sharp-nosed hand plows pulled by yoked oxen and women carried water jars on their heads. India was a country of usable antiques.” The last line is particularly arresting.
Theroux, who is essentially an anthropological traveler, creates the Blundens, Huntsinger and Alice as representative average Americans and sets them up against Indian characters such as Anna Hunphunwoshi, Dr. Nagraj, Mr. Shah, Sumitra and Amitabh. Deep down, these characters are merely cultural manifestations of the two countries whose coming together inevitably causes conflict.
It is not clear whether Theroux’s people have come to India specifically in search of something spiritually ennobling or at the very least something culturally challenging. Or perhaps they are using India to straighten their own lives. However, for all his major characters the India experience does turn out to be exceptionally unsettling.
For instance, the story of Dwight Huntsinger, a stuck-up Boston lawyer snapping up business deals in Mumbai even as he detests the city, and how he comes unstuck when one day he discovers the grimy and manipulative underbelly of the city. Instead of stepping back and checking himself in time, Dwight goes all the way in search of hidden sexual pleasures in the musty lanes near his five star hotel. Theroux does a superb job of juxtaposing how cultural interactions can affect regular people—an American in India and an Indian in America. The Indian in America being Shah, a fastidious legal mind assisting Dwight in vetting business contracts with Indian manufacturers, who after his maiden visit to the US returns having shed his unctuousness bordering on the servility and become annoyingly self-assured.
This theme of cultural transposition recurs in the last story about Alice. When she first meets Amitabh on board a train he comes across as someone obsequious, even deferential albeit importuning. Later in the story after Alice has taught him and others American English and its nuances as part of call center training Bangalore, Amitabh becomes “American” in his language and attitude, quite like Americans that Alice was used to.
Theroux makes many seemingly incidental but damning observations about India and Indians throughout the novellas. Sample this one: “The miracle to them was that India was not a country but a creature, like a monstrous body crawling with smaller creatures, pestilential with people—a big horrific being, sometimes angry and loud, sometimes passive and stinking, always hostile, even dangerous. And another miracle was that they’d found a remote part of it that was safe.” In another place he writes: “If India had a human face, it was that of a hungry skinny girl, starved of love, famished for money.”
Theroux also turns a disapproving eye on novelists, both native Indian and expatriate, and suggests they often present a romanticized view of the country. In contrast, the author presents an India shorn of all its exotica. In doing so he often cuts it too close to the bone. In the last novella he writes: "Indian novels she'd read in the States had not prepared her for what she saw here. Where were the big fruitful families from these novels? Where were the jokes, the love affairs, the lavish marriage ceremonies, the solemn pieties, the virtuous peasants, the environmentalists, the musicians, the magic, the plausible young men? They seemed concocted to her now, and besieged in up-close India, all she thought of was Hieronymus Bosch, turtle-faced crones, stumpy men, deformed children."
I could be completely off the target here but the overarching sense I got while reading the book was that every character represented some aspect of the author himself. Even in Sumitra, the conniving streetwalker, I could not help seeing traces of Theroux.
Overall, “The Elephanta Suite” is a powerful example of how evocative language can become in the hands of a master. One may disagree with many of his cultural assertions and even be offended by them, but I personally read books for their language first and narrative second. On that score Theroux is unquestionably outstanding.
Unqualified praise is but one response to any work by master stylist Paul Theroux for he is able to provoke, infuriate, annoy, anger, rile, stimulate and eventually persuade with equal facility.
His latest book, “The Elephanta Suite” sets out to slice through myriad and complex cultural layers that make up India. He does it with discommoding success. Mind you, a lot of what he says about India through his protagonists can be construed as an unabashed attempt to raise the reader’s heckles. In the end, one is not even sure whether he loves India or despises it. But that is the whole point of the book. It is impossible to distil India down to a neat and intellectually edifying formulation. Theroux approaches India as a mature adult who does not believe in wasting time on politeness as a device to strike up a quick yet shallow relationship with an ancient and baffling civilization. He treats India, at any rate India as it is now, as a robust civilization that can take many hits from a rancid critic in the right spirit without losing its inherent greatness.
With this slim volume of three novellas Theroux proves yet again his unremitting brilliance as a contriver of outstanding prose. He writes with incisive skills rarely, if ever, seen in a Western writer about India. He uses language both as a surgeon’s scalpel and a blacksmith’s sledgehammer. One cannot escape the feeling that the underlying emotion surviving after his protagonists are scarred by their encounters with India is profound unhappiness. Be it the deeply unresolved couple, Beth and Audie Blunden, deeply unsatisfied “lawyer and moneyman” Dwight Huntsinger or deeply distressed traveler Alice, they all come across as fundamentally unhappy souls who are in the country by choice or otherwise in search of something transforming only to be swindled by the crafty modern/ancient India.
It is immediately obvious to the reader that Theroux is an astute observer. Right from something as trivial as using many different Indian names in this 274-page book to the more complex social and cultural undercurrents of a society pulled in contradictory directions by its history and its modernity Theroux gets the details right. Not that I have read a great deal but I am willing to stick my neck out, and perhaps make a fool of myself, and say that he is the first Western writer to have grasped modern/ancient India so well.
In a particular passage in the last novella “The Elephant God” he writes: “Now ‘utterance’ was one of those words, like ‘miscreants’, ‘audacious’, ‘thrice’, ‘ample’ and ‘jocundity’ that some Indians used in casual conversation and Indian writers used in sentences, in the same way out the window the Indian farmers were using antique sharp-nosed hand plows pulled by yoked oxen and women carried water jars on their heads. India was a country of usable antiques.” The last line is particularly arresting.
Theroux, who is essentially an anthropological traveler, creates the Blundens, Huntsinger and Alice as representative average Americans and sets them up against Indian characters such as Anna Hunphunwoshi, Dr. Nagraj, Mr. Shah, Sumitra and Amitabh. Deep down, these characters are merely cultural manifestations of the two countries whose coming together inevitably causes conflict.
It is not clear whether Theroux’s people have come to India specifically in search of something spiritually ennobling or at the very least something culturally challenging. Or perhaps they are using India to straighten their own lives. However, for all his major characters the India experience does turn out to be exceptionally unsettling.
For instance, the story of Dwight Huntsinger, a stuck-up Boston lawyer snapping up business deals in Mumbai even as he detests the city, and how he comes unstuck when one day he discovers the grimy and manipulative underbelly of the city. Instead of stepping back and checking himself in time, Dwight goes all the way in search of hidden sexual pleasures in the musty lanes near his five star hotel. Theroux does a superb job of juxtaposing how cultural interactions can affect regular people—an American in India and an Indian in America. The Indian in America being Shah, a fastidious legal mind assisting Dwight in vetting business contracts with Indian manufacturers, who after his maiden visit to the US returns having shed his unctuousness bordering on the servility and become annoyingly self-assured.
This theme of cultural transposition recurs in the last story about Alice. When she first meets Amitabh on board a train he comes across as someone obsequious, even deferential albeit importuning. Later in the story after Alice has taught him and others American English and its nuances as part of call center training Bangalore, Amitabh becomes “American” in his language and attitude, quite like Americans that Alice was used to.
Theroux makes many seemingly incidental but damning observations about India and Indians throughout the novellas. Sample this one: “The miracle to them was that India was not a country but a creature, like a monstrous body crawling with smaller creatures, pestilential with people—a big horrific being, sometimes angry and loud, sometimes passive and stinking, always hostile, even dangerous. And another miracle was that they’d found a remote part of it that was safe.” In another place he writes: “If India had a human face, it was that of a hungry skinny girl, starved of love, famished for money.”
Theroux also turns a disapproving eye on novelists, both native Indian and expatriate, and suggests they often present a romanticized view of the country. In contrast, the author presents an India shorn of all its exotica. In doing so he often cuts it too close to the bone. In the last novella he writes: "Indian novels she'd read in the States had not prepared her for what she saw here. Where were the big fruitful families from these novels? Where were the jokes, the love affairs, the lavish marriage ceremonies, the solemn pieties, the virtuous peasants, the environmentalists, the musicians, the magic, the plausible young men? They seemed concocted to her now, and besieged in up-close India, all she thought of was Hieronymus Bosch, turtle-faced crones, stumpy men, deformed children."
I could be completely off the target here but the overarching sense I got while reading the book was that every character represented some aspect of the author himself. Even in Sumitra, the conniving streetwalker, I could not help seeing traces of Theroux.
Overall, “The Elephanta Suite” is a powerful example of how evocative language can become in the hands of a master. One may disagree with many of his cultural assertions and even be offended by them, but I personally read books for their language first and narrative second. On that score Theroux is unquestionably outstanding.
July 9, 2015
I have to say I really enjoyed the three novellas in The Elephant Suite set in India by Paul Theroux. And a part of the reason I enjoyed them so much was that I knew about the inspiration for them and some of the real life experiences that Theroux had while traveling in India for his book, Ghost Train To The Eastern Star. Theroux was disturbed by India and couldn't fully reconcile himself to those experiences he had and I think writing these novellas were a way to set down his feelings and experiences of that overwhelming and overbearing country. The story of a wealthy American couple's sensual brush with India that reminded them that they were outsiders and possibly corrupters of the spiritual heritage that still exists in modern India. The second is a middle aged business man who is seduced and won over by India and undergoes a complete personality change. And the last story of a college student caught in the world of spirituality and commerce and comes face to face with India bureaucracy and the while managing to get biblical-like redemption. In retrospect there are some heavy handed literary devices employed by Theroux with doubles, doppelgangers, and other flourishes, which didn't seem too heavy handed to me as I was drawn into his descriptions of the sights, smells, and intense feelings that India created within the characters.
October 10, 2012
I read this book a month back.
I have this curiosity to know what the white man thinks of Indians. Its like fishing for compliments.Whenever a white skin of minor importance, because the majorly important give this place a wide berth, visits Cal, the inevitable question asked is, "Do you think that Calcutta is India's cultural capital???" Whatever that means.The charitably affirmative reply is lapped up gleefully and even makes near-headlines in the Telegragh.
The same mentality made me read Paul Theroux's book.Do they think we are wise,ancient,spiritually evolved,selfless? Or conceited,selfish,sly,hypocritical,and fatally untrustworthy? All three protagonists in the loosely joined triple novella found Indians to be of the latter disposition. And further,with a proclivity towards rape. Yes, poor Indian sods just can't control their lust when the skin colour is white. It seems that the Indian experience of poverty,chaos and crowdedness somehow stimulates sex. Maybe this is not surprising if you consider our population explosion. Its a fecund hot and steamy place we inhabit propagating like microbes.
Paul isn't sympathetic, but he's honest. I'm sure its difficult to experience India positively, unless all educated, Western, liberal baggage is discarded.
I have this curiosity to know what the white man thinks of Indians. Its like fishing for compliments.Whenever a white skin of minor importance, because the majorly important give this place a wide berth, visits Cal, the inevitable question asked is, "Do you think that Calcutta is India's cultural capital???" Whatever that means.The charitably affirmative reply is lapped up gleefully and even makes near-headlines in the Telegragh.
The same mentality made me read Paul Theroux's book.Do they think we are wise,ancient,spiritually evolved,selfless? Or conceited,selfish,sly,hypocritical,and fatally untrustworthy? All three protagonists in the loosely joined triple novella found Indians to be of the latter disposition. And further,with a proclivity towards rape. Yes, poor Indian sods just can't control their lust when the skin colour is white. It seems that the Indian experience of poverty,chaos and crowdedness somehow stimulates sex. Maybe this is not surprising if you consider our population explosion. Its a fecund hot and steamy place we inhabit propagating like microbes.
Paul isn't sympathetic, but he's honest. I'm sure its difficult to experience India positively, unless all educated, Western, liberal baggage is discarded.
November 9, 2020
I'm dnfing about halfway in (my first dnf of the year) - its boring, disgusting and I hate everyone and everything in this
March 15, 2010
The only reason I managed to finish this book is because it was three short stories. I did not like the first two, Monkey Hill and The Gateway of India. The last one, The Elephant God, I enjoyed until the end. According to the front jacket "Theroux's portraits of people and places explode stereotypes to exhilarating effects." I did not find this to be the case at all. In fact, I found the stereotypes to be just that, stereotypes-both of the Indian and American characters.
The writing wasn't horrible. It was readable which is why I gave it 2 stars. It just was flat and only mildly interesting.
The writing wasn't horrible. It was readable which is why I gave it 2 stars. It just was flat and only mildly interesting.
May 8, 2018
Paul Theroux's The Elephanta Suite is named after a luxury hotel suite in Mumbai (Bombay) that figures briefly in all three novellas in this collection.
The first, "Monkey Hill," is about a wealthy American couple who stay at an idyllic ayurvedic spa. They react well to the therapy, but slowly find themselves drawn sexually to the therapists. Suddenly, the spa seems to change hands and the couple are thrown into a rickety vehicle headed through a mob protesting the conversion of a Muslim shrine to a Hindu temple honoring Hanuman, the Monkey God.
"The Gateway of India" gives us an American businessman investigating outsourcing in India. At first, India repulses him, but he finds himself ineluctably drawn to poor young Mumbai prostitutes, including one that is obviously a child.
The best of the three tales, "The Elephant God," has a young American woman traveling to an ahram in Bangalore and getting involved with a friendly elephant she sees tethered in town. She also is being stalked by an overweight young Indian call center worker who perpetrates an outrage on her person. She takes a very appropriate revenge on him.
I enjoyed all three tales, which seemed to get better as the book went on. Although I have read many of Theroux's travel books, I am relatively new to his novels. He's actually quite good. A couple of years ago, a start was made on a film starring Michael Caine in the middle story, "The Gateway of India." Apparently, it is either still in production or abandoned.
The first, "Monkey Hill," is about a wealthy American couple who stay at an idyllic ayurvedic spa. They react well to the therapy, but slowly find themselves drawn sexually to the therapists. Suddenly, the spa seems to change hands and the couple are thrown into a rickety vehicle headed through a mob protesting the conversion of a Muslim shrine to a Hindu temple honoring Hanuman, the Monkey God.
"The Gateway of India" gives us an American businessman investigating outsourcing in India. At first, India repulses him, but he finds himself ineluctably drawn to poor young Mumbai prostitutes, including one that is obviously a child.
The best of the three tales, "The Elephant God," has a young American woman traveling to an ahram in Bangalore and getting involved with a friendly elephant she sees tethered in town. She also is being stalked by an overweight young Indian call center worker who perpetrates an outrage on her person. She takes a very appropriate revenge on him.
I enjoyed all three tales, which seemed to get better as the book went on. Although I have read many of Theroux's travel books, I am relatively new to his novels. He's actually quite good. A couple of years ago, a start was made on a film starring Michael Caine in the middle story, "The Gateway of India." Apparently, it is either still in production or abandoned.
October 7, 2013
Three varied stories where the suite features in each story and indeed some characters flow into the next story but other than foreigners exploring the rich differences of India compared to home and each main character attempting to find their own truth of themselves, the three tales are richly different and memorable. Good read. Good writer.
August 6, 2021
Paul Theroux in this fine book proves why he is my second favorite writer. From the get-go he juggles characters and scene with spellbinding description and in a voice that's sure and fine; note that voice is more than a language function but the sum totality of a writer's experiences and means of expression and Paul's voice rocks bigly here as elsewhere in the lion's share of his books I've consumed and have on two shelves in my study ... in my Paul Theroux section. I'd write more but it's 2:23 a.m. Yokohama time. Zzzz Eric Madeen ericmadeen.com
June 25, 2025
Evocative writing about colourful, contradictory India by a master travel writer, as expected, but too many unlikeable characters or characters I was simply indifferent to. There was a satisfying revenge-driven denouement in the final novella, though.
July 21, 2021
Audie Blunden and his wife Beth are staying in a lodge above a village in the foothills of the himalayas. It's called Agri, a former maharaja's residence, a baronial mansion and in the Bamboo Grove the spa building, the pool, the palm trees, the yoga Pavilion, glowing in spotlights, the whole place crowning the summit of the Hill.
Audie is rich, so this character feels entitled. He feels entitled to helping himself to women's bodies too, and feels no burden to his conscious to lying to them to get what he wants out of them.
"His love for Beth was sincere. He had said he'd loved these women, but the word never got out of the bedroom. He had desired them and could spend an entire afternoon in a hotel room with them, but it was an evaporating passion -- he shrank at the thought of sitting across the table from them for an hour to have a meal. In his life, though he had searched, he had never met a woman who felt the same, who could separate desire from love. The women he'd known combined these feelings. For them, desire was love, and it was also the promise of a future. Desire was hope, a house, children, a car, a vacation, new shoes, even grandchildren. But for him desire had a beginning and an end -- no middle, no future, only it's ungraspable evaporation. The end that seemed so natural to him was seen by the women as a betrayal. But worse than "I hate you" was that rejected face, that abandoned posture, the disappointment, the tears.
Shatoosh, made from the neck hair yanked out from a kind of antelope that is an endangered species, is a kind of scarf that rich women like to possess. Beth Blunden is no better of a character than her husband is. She goes to the front desk of the lodge and asks if they know where she can get a shatoosh. One of the workers, an ayurvedic doctor, takes them into the village below the lodge. This is where Beth can find her scarf made out of the hair yanked cruelly from the neck of an endangered species.
"After Dr nagaraj dismissed the driver, the three walked the rest of the way up the hill. Audie asked the cost of the scarves. Dr nagaraj seemed relieved and mentioned the price, and he smiled as $5,000 was counted into his hand. 'A great bargain, sir. And you are so lucky. This antelope is almost extinct.' "
Dwight huntsinger is a kind of business man that helps American Rich boys connect with the cheapest labor from india. Outsourcing jobs, is what it's called. It's the reason why the United States is turning into a third world country, And China is the New world superpower. He's the third despicable American character plundering india, in the author's book, because he can. He uses the Indian women, who give their bodies because they are desperate for money, and tries to kid himself that he truly cares about them.
"... How her father touched her -- the shame of it; how her mother beat her, blaming her, and her father sent her away to her auntie's village; how her auntie locked her in an unlit room with the grain sacks and the rats; how, when Indru went to the police, they didn't believe her; how the village boys threw bricks of cowshit at her, and when her uncle happened by to rescue her, he drove her on his motorbike to the river bank, where he dragged her through the bamboo.
'He touch me here, he touch me down here on my privates, he bite me with his teeth and call me dirty dog.'
they were harrowing stories, the more terrifying for the factual way she told them, lying on her back on the string bed, her fingertips grazing her body to indicate where she had been violated. She seemed to understand how they seized Dwight's attention and silenced him. And some evenings when he looked distracted, his gaze drifting to the window, sleepy and satisfied, she would prop herself on one elbow and drop her voice and show him a scar on her wrist, whitish on her dark skin.
'One Uncle tie me with ropes. He say, "is a game.' I be so scare. He take my sari. He say, "I no hurt you."
And what she told him next in that soft voice was more powerful to him than the racket at the window. He took a deep breath and gagged and thought, not a success at all -- it's a failure.
The smell of failure in India wasn't only Indian failure. It was a universal smell of human weakness, the stink of humanity, his own failure too. His firm of lawyers was bringing so many people down."
Dwight's own marriage was a short failure.
"At last he saw his divorce as a triumph. No one else did, which was another reason he was happy to be in india. Perhaps failure was the severest kind of truth. His work was a punishment and a wrecking ball: he took manufacturing away from American companies and brought it to india. The American manufacturers hated him -- and they failed; the Indian companies were cynical, knowing that if they could not produce goods cheaply enough, they would be rejected. Every success meant someone's failure. He could not take any pride in that process: he was part of it."
Listen to this disgusting scene:
"The way she got to her feet in pretty Little stages, first lifting her head to face him, tossing her braid aside, then raising herself by digging her fingers into his knees for balance, almost undid him. Then she was peeling off his shirt as he approached the charpoy. He watched her shimmy out of her dress, using her shoulders. When her dress dropped to her ankles she stepped out of it, kicking the door closed with one foot.
'I know what you want,' she said as he took her head, cupping her ears, and moved it like a melon on his lap."
🤢
The fourth American character plundering india, bringing her own culture with her, is alice. She is a taking a traveling vacation, before she begins graduate school. She goes to an ashram, in bangalore, but soon runs out of money. She gets a job teaching phone technicians in a call center, who answer questions on appliances from callers in the United states, how to speak American English and pronounce with American accents.
But when she wants to take a week to go visit the elephant god shrine on the east coast, she runs into problems.
"This was the same grateful woman who had said, you have worked wonders. I think you are being modest about your achievements.
'What is your purpose in this holiday?'
'excuse me?'
'where are you going, may I ask, and who with?'
Alice said with a hoot of triumph, 'with all respect, I don't understand how that is any of your business.'
and she knew in saying that, and seeing miss ghosh's face darken -- the prune-like skin around her sunken eyes, the way Indians revealed their age, and the eyes themselves going cold -- that she had burned a bridge.
Things went no better at the ashram. She did not need to seek permission to leave -- after all she was a paying guest. Yet when she broke the news to priyanka, who, because she spoke hindi, held a senior position as a go-between and interpreter with the ashram staff, Priyanka became haughty and said in an affected way she used for scolding, 'I am afraid that Swami will not be best pleased.'
'it's only a week.'
'Swami is not happy to see people using his ashram as a hostel, merely coming and going willy-nilly.'
'One week,' Alice said, and thought, I have never heard an American utter the phrase 'willy-nilly.'
'but you are a requesting checkout.'
'I'm not requesting checkout, as you put it. I just don't see any point in my paying for my room and my food if I'm not here.'
Priyanka turned sideways in her chair and faced the window. She said, 'if you like, I will submit your request. You will have to apply in writing, in triplicate. I will see that your request is followed up. But I'm not hopeful of a positive result.' "
Alice is sexually assaulted by the young Indian man who helped her get the job at the call center. She feels that her helping him learn American accents and American expressions, emboldens him. But the way she uses a poor captive elephant to solve her problem was a very poor ending on the author's part, in my opinion.
The book was entertaining, and Theroux can write, but written from the Viewpoint of an author who makes his money being a travel writer, caused me to give it less Stars. I prefer his non-travel writing.
Audie is rich, so this character feels entitled. He feels entitled to helping himself to women's bodies too, and feels no burden to his conscious to lying to them to get what he wants out of them.
"His love for Beth was sincere. He had said he'd loved these women, but the word never got out of the bedroom. He had desired them and could spend an entire afternoon in a hotel room with them, but it was an evaporating passion -- he shrank at the thought of sitting across the table from them for an hour to have a meal. In his life, though he had searched, he had never met a woman who felt the same, who could separate desire from love. The women he'd known combined these feelings. For them, desire was love, and it was also the promise of a future. Desire was hope, a house, children, a car, a vacation, new shoes, even grandchildren. But for him desire had a beginning and an end -- no middle, no future, only it's ungraspable evaporation. The end that seemed so natural to him was seen by the women as a betrayal. But worse than "I hate you" was that rejected face, that abandoned posture, the disappointment, the tears.
Shatoosh, made from the neck hair yanked out from a kind of antelope that is an endangered species, is a kind of scarf that rich women like to possess. Beth Blunden is no better of a character than her husband is. She goes to the front desk of the lodge and asks if they know where she can get a shatoosh. One of the workers, an ayurvedic doctor, takes them into the village below the lodge. This is where Beth can find her scarf made out of the hair yanked cruelly from the neck of an endangered species.
"After Dr nagaraj dismissed the driver, the three walked the rest of the way up the hill. Audie asked the cost of the scarves. Dr nagaraj seemed relieved and mentioned the price, and he smiled as $5,000 was counted into his hand. 'A great bargain, sir. And you are so lucky. This antelope is almost extinct.' "
Dwight huntsinger is a kind of business man that helps American Rich boys connect with the cheapest labor from india. Outsourcing jobs, is what it's called. It's the reason why the United States is turning into a third world country, And China is the New world superpower. He's the third despicable American character plundering india, in the author's book, because he can. He uses the Indian women, who give their bodies because they are desperate for money, and tries to kid himself that he truly cares about them.
"... How her father touched her -- the shame of it; how her mother beat her, blaming her, and her father sent her away to her auntie's village; how her auntie locked her in an unlit room with the grain sacks and the rats; how, when Indru went to the police, they didn't believe her; how the village boys threw bricks of cowshit at her, and when her uncle happened by to rescue her, he drove her on his motorbike to the river bank, where he dragged her through the bamboo.
'He touch me here, he touch me down here on my privates, he bite me with his teeth and call me dirty dog.'
they were harrowing stories, the more terrifying for the factual way she told them, lying on her back on the string bed, her fingertips grazing her body to indicate where she had been violated. She seemed to understand how they seized Dwight's attention and silenced him. And some evenings when he looked distracted, his gaze drifting to the window, sleepy and satisfied, she would prop herself on one elbow and drop her voice and show him a scar on her wrist, whitish on her dark skin.
'One Uncle tie me with ropes. He say, "is a game.' I be so scare. He take my sari. He say, "I no hurt you."
And what she told him next in that soft voice was more powerful to him than the racket at the window. He took a deep breath and gagged and thought, not a success at all -- it's a failure.
The smell of failure in India wasn't only Indian failure. It was a universal smell of human weakness, the stink of humanity, his own failure too. His firm of lawyers was bringing so many people down."
Dwight's own marriage was a short failure.
"At last he saw his divorce as a triumph. No one else did, which was another reason he was happy to be in india. Perhaps failure was the severest kind of truth. His work was a punishment and a wrecking ball: he took manufacturing away from American companies and brought it to india. The American manufacturers hated him -- and they failed; the Indian companies were cynical, knowing that if they could not produce goods cheaply enough, they would be rejected. Every success meant someone's failure. He could not take any pride in that process: he was part of it."
Listen to this disgusting scene:
"The way she got to her feet in pretty Little stages, first lifting her head to face him, tossing her braid aside, then raising herself by digging her fingers into his knees for balance, almost undid him. Then she was peeling off his shirt as he approached the charpoy. He watched her shimmy out of her dress, using her shoulders. When her dress dropped to her ankles she stepped out of it, kicking the door closed with one foot.
'I know what you want,' she said as he took her head, cupping her ears, and moved it like a melon on his lap."
🤢
The fourth American character plundering india, bringing her own culture with her, is alice. She is a taking a traveling vacation, before she begins graduate school. She goes to an ashram, in bangalore, but soon runs out of money. She gets a job teaching phone technicians in a call center, who answer questions on appliances from callers in the United states, how to speak American English and pronounce with American accents.
But when she wants to take a week to go visit the elephant god shrine on the east coast, she runs into problems.
"This was the same grateful woman who had said, you have worked wonders. I think you are being modest about your achievements.
'What is your purpose in this holiday?'
'excuse me?'
'where are you going, may I ask, and who with?'
Alice said with a hoot of triumph, 'with all respect, I don't understand how that is any of your business.'
and she knew in saying that, and seeing miss ghosh's face darken -- the prune-like skin around her sunken eyes, the way Indians revealed their age, and the eyes themselves going cold -- that she had burned a bridge.
Things went no better at the ashram. She did not need to seek permission to leave -- after all she was a paying guest. Yet when she broke the news to priyanka, who, because she spoke hindi, held a senior position as a go-between and interpreter with the ashram staff, Priyanka became haughty and said in an affected way she used for scolding, 'I am afraid that Swami will not be best pleased.'
'it's only a week.'
'Swami is not happy to see people using his ashram as a hostel, merely coming and going willy-nilly.'
'One week,' Alice said, and thought, I have never heard an American utter the phrase 'willy-nilly.'
'but you are a requesting checkout.'
'I'm not requesting checkout, as you put it. I just don't see any point in my paying for my room and my food if I'm not here.'
Priyanka turned sideways in her chair and faced the window. She said, 'if you like, I will submit your request. You will have to apply in writing, in triplicate. I will see that your request is followed up. But I'm not hopeful of a positive result.' "
Alice is sexually assaulted by the young Indian man who helped her get the job at the call center. She feels that her helping him learn American accents and American expressions, emboldens him. But the way she uses a poor captive elephant to solve her problem was a very poor ending on the author's part, in my opinion.
The book was entertaining, and Theroux can write, but written from the Viewpoint of an author who makes his money being a travel writer, caused me to give it less Stars. I prefer his non-travel writing.
March 2, 2015
Although Theroux paints a very negative picture of India, it is a very well written book and it kept me attentive all the way to the finish- 345 pages! I think that is why I gave it 5 stars. Paul Theroux, in dealing with his impressions of India, is also dealing with a very complex, troubled and elusive India: an India that cannot be summed up in a few lines or the scope of a novel, one that is beyond good and evil, but possibly negative and tragic. Its true nature always eluding the Westerner,especially the American, in trying to figure out India after being attracted by its many lures, will only find out that it is a smelly, monstrous, possibly dangerous, and ultimately a grotesque parody of a English speaking nation like the USA or Britain. Indians were not only poor and full of guile, but also disingenuous and relentless in their bids to exploit the white man! Sincerity, friendliness and a selfless manner of conducting oneself, was beyond an Indian individual. The Indians will always try to take advantage of you if you happen to be white and American- "People offering favors in India always were in need of greater favors. No charity ever, there was only salesmanship", Theroux blurts out at some point. A great many observations are perhaps true, not only of India, but also generally of the Indian sub-continent (Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri-Lanka). Poverty, ages of colonial rule, sharply pronounced class divisions and corruption have left the people without self-respect, obsequious, opportunistic, corrupt and often thoroughly hypocritical. What makes all these rather funny is the excessive optimism and fool-hardy confidence that educated citizens of these countries often exhibit- results of uneven economic growth, commercial success stories and a small number of rich oligarchs who exhibit their new found wealth in the languages of confidence, conspicuous consumption and media presence.
April 10, 2009
Like the grubby Americans whose adventures are documented in the three stories here, I was expecting a romantic experience with India in this book: the scents, the crushing poverty, moments of serene beauty and transformation.
What you get instead is a grim two-sided world. The pampered pale foreigners on one side, and the intricate mass of india on the other, both relying on dehumanizing usage patterns to survive. The Americans are clearly, brazenly using the Indians, and the Indians play on the shame and vanity of the American to use them in return. In this book, India is a gigantic DMV filled with paperwork and fees and duites paid. It is possibly as unromantic a take on an exotic locale as I've read.
Paul Theroux is a seasoned traveller, but with this calloused view of humanity, one wonders why. It is the only book I've read by him, so wonder if he views the whole world as whores and idiots and opportunists, where only the hardened will trive. The intricale clockwork of humanity kept me going through the stories even when I hated everyone in them, and thereby, I actually liked the book, but it is a cold breed of "like." I think because, like the travellers in the book, I had my notions rudely shaken, and even when you don;t like what you see, it is still good for you to see it.
What you get instead is a grim two-sided world. The pampered pale foreigners on one side, and the intricate mass of india on the other, both relying on dehumanizing usage patterns to survive. The Americans are clearly, brazenly using the Indians, and the Indians play on the shame and vanity of the American to use them in return. In this book, India is a gigantic DMV filled with paperwork and fees and duites paid. It is possibly as unromantic a take on an exotic locale as I've read.
Paul Theroux is a seasoned traveller, but with this calloused view of humanity, one wonders why. It is the only book I've read by him, so wonder if he views the whole world as whores and idiots and opportunists, where only the hardened will trive. The intricale clockwork of humanity kept me going through the stories even when I hated everyone in them, and thereby, I actually liked the book, but it is a cold breed of "like." I think because, like the travellers in the book, I had my notions rudely shaken, and even when you don;t like what you see, it is still good for you to see it.
February 23, 2013
3 Novellas Set in India
These are three novellas set in India. They revolve around three sets or types of Americans in India. The most convincing is that of the young American female tourist. The other two are about an American businessman (in his forties) in Mumbai, and a middle-aged couple in a yoga camp or ashram.
The stories are all entertaining and very readable and the Indian settings conveyed by Paul Theroux are indeed vivid.
I do have a problem with why these people are in India - particularly the first two stories. In the case of the middle-aged couple - why would a cut-throat millionaire businessman, who we are told owned several companies, want to spend weeks in a sedate Indian Ashram?
In the second story, would a businessman in his forties really carry-on and sustain a lurid relationship with an Indian prostitute in her hovel with bugs, rats... in close proximity? Would a young independent American woman be kissing the Swami's feet?
Also the stories have surprise endings - and to some extent improbable - would Amitabh - who was a pretty wily fellow - have met such an end?
Nevertheless, despite these short-comings, the settings and character interactions are very strong. I liked the fact that Paul Theroux painted a portrait of India that is far removed from a glamorous Bollywood portrayal.
These are three novellas set in India. They revolve around three sets or types of Americans in India. The most convincing is that of the young American female tourist. The other two are about an American businessman (in his forties) in Mumbai, and a middle-aged couple in a yoga camp or ashram.
The stories are all entertaining and very readable and the Indian settings conveyed by Paul Theroux are indeed vivid.
I do have a problem with why these people are in India - particularly the first two stories. In the case of the middle-aged couple - why would a cut-throat millionaire businessman, who we are told owned several companies, want to spend weeks in a sedate Indian Ashram?
In the second story, would a businessman in his forties really carry-on and sustain a lurid relationship with an Indian prostitute in her hovel with bugs, rats... in close proximity? Would a young independent American woman be kissing the Swami's feet?
Also the stories have surprise endings - and to some extent improbable - would Amitabh - who was a pretty wily fellow - have met such an end?
Nevertheless, despite these short-comings, the settings and character interactions are very strong. I liked the fact that Paul Theroux painted a portrait of India that is far removed from a glamorous Bollywood portrayal.
March 31, 2011
All three stories are a bit disturbing, the first two left me feeling a bit "what was that about?" The people in them weren't very interesting or likable, and I found the ending unsatisfying . I liked the third story best, Alice's experiences with her travel-mate, at the ashram and her relationship with the elephant who avenges her made for interesting reading, even if they ending was as dark as the others.
Some of his descriptions are very good, but with few exceptions (the Jain, the mahout and his wife) the Indians that appear are rather unpleasant if not downright conniving and manipulative - which irritated me. Overall a dark and somewhat depressing book that I can't really say I enjoyed reading.
Some of his descriptions are very good, but with few exceptions (the Jain, the mahout and his wife) the Indians that appear are rather unpleasant if not downright conniving and manipulative - which irritated me. Overall a dark and somewhat depressing book that I can't really say I enjoyed reading.
June 24, 2014
Read this somewhat disturbing book in a weekend. It essentially consists of three short stories with just a bit of a connection between them. The author looks at modern life in India through the lense of three different sets of American eyes. Slightly troubling but did a wonderful job capturing the sights and smells that I experienced on my short visit there a few years ago. He uncovers the skepticism and narrow-mindedness of Americans while also acknowledging some of the darker sides and complexities of modern India.
SPOILER ALERT ---- DO NOT READ BEYOND HERE IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW
Why is there always a Rape Scene in almost every book I read!?! UGH!
SPOILER ALERT ---- DO NOT READ BEYOND HERE IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW
Why is there always a Rape Scene in almost every book I read!?! UGH!
March 27, 2021
I enjoy theroux's books though they do have a degree of misanthropy and dour vibes to them
3 short stories detailing travel in India, self discovery, some degree of eroticism. All contain at least minor elements regarding elephants.
Likely, if i was from India, I would not appreciate the portrayal of the country in this book.
However, Theroux also paints the Westerners in this book in a pretty negative light as well, and very much shining a critical light on the "self-discovery" trope, so in that way I believe it is an "equal opportunity" pessimistic book.
I enjoyed the book though I could see why it would not be someone else's cup of tea.
4/5.
3 short stories detailing travel in India, self discovery, some degree of eroticism. All contain at least minor elements regarding elephants.
Likely, if i was from India, I would not appreciate the portrayal of the country in this book.
However, Theroux also paints the Westerners in this book in a pretty negative light as well, and very much shining a critical light on the "self-discovery" trope, so in that way I believe it is an "equal opportunity" pessimistic book.
I enjoyed the book though I could see why it would not be someone else's cup of tea.
4/5.
August 25, 2022
Interesting and intense novel set in India. The setting and characters are complex and rich in details. It's written like 3 stories in 1 book. Complicated twists and turns throughout the story.
November 26, 2023
Americans in over their head in an exotic country. This is lesser Bowles, lacking in menace and focusing on bland protagonists in whom you never become invested. The book did leave me with a wry smile of appreciation, however, so all was not lost.
June 27, 2014
Three novellas by Paul Theroux about Western travelers in India.
The first is about a very privileged husband and wife, both of whom cheat on the other while in a fancy spa in the mountains. They end up overstepping their bounds by hooking up with the wrong people in India, and the staff at the spa rebel and ultimately reject them. The husband and wife get chewed up and spit out in a typical Paul Theroux violent, chaotic, lost-in-a-foreign-land way.
The second is about a Western businessman who, well, again, sleeps with the wrong people in India... haha. He sinks to all kinds of base levels (sex with minors, etc.) and you the reader end up really hating him. Then at the very end, he has a moral awakening. It was an interesting twist at the end.
The third is about a savvy young college-educated woman who gets abandoned by her travel companion and strikes out on her own. She ends up in an ashram, and also working as an American-accent coach in a call center staffed by Indians. The whole time, she is rather taken by an elephant and his keeper... the elephant is sort of her own personal god--her own Ganesh. The elephant keeps her centered throughout some increasingly crazy events around her. She ends up being stalked (and later, worse) by one of her American accent students. This part is such interesting writing, because this Indian man speaks more and more in American cliches and the dialogue is funny and also weird due to this. Ultimately, she is driven to extremes.
This paragraph sums up both what I love about travel personally, and what I enjoy about Theroux's travel writing:
"She had made the traveler's most important discovery. You went away from home and moved among strangers. No one knew your history of who you were: you started afresh, a kind of rebirth. Being whoever you wished to be, whoever you claimed to be, was a liberation."
The first is about a very privileged husband and wife, both of whom cheat on the other while in a fancy spa in the mountains. They end up overstepping their bounds by hooking up with the wrong people in India, and the staff at the spa rebel and ultimately reject them. The husband and wife get chewed up and spit out in a typical Paul Theroux violent, chaotic, lost-in-a-foreign-land way.
The second is about a Western businessman who, well, again, sleeps with the wrong people in India... haha. He sinks to all kinds of base levels (sex with minors, etc.) and you the reader end up really hating him. Then at the very end, he has a moral awakening. It was an interesting twist at the end.
The third is about a savvy young college-educated woman who gets abandoned by her travel companion and strikes out on her own. She ends up in an ashram, and also working as an American-accent coach in a call center staffed by Indians. The whole time, she is rather taken by an elephant and his keeper... the elephant is sort of her own personal god--her own Ganesh. The elephant keeps her centered throughout some increasingly crazy events around her. She ends up being stalked (and later, worse) by one of her American accent students. This part is such interesting writing, because this Indian man speaks more and more in American cliches and the dialogue is funny and also weird due to this. Ultimately, she is driven to extremes.
This paragraph sums up both what I love about travel personally, and what I enjoy about Theroux's travel writing:
"She had made the traveler's most important discovery. You went away from home and moved among strangers. No one knew your history of who you were: you started afresh, a kind of rebirth. Being whoever you wished to be, whoever you claimed to be, was a liberation."
May 6, 2015
Fascinating read. Americans in India, overwhelmed. Maybe seeking something that they are not sure of. The common thread for these three stories is the Elephanta Suite.
One story is about the "vacationing" Americans and how they are protected from the poverty and living conditions the people who serve their tables experience. And how they both, in their own time, become debauched in their minds.
The second story is a high powered business man, in the business of outsourcing deals, spending his time ensconced in his hotel, afraid to have any part of India contaminate him. His forced isolation works against him in the most interesting way.
The third story is a woman who wants to find the enlightenment in India by devoting herself in an ashram. She is expected to contribute financially and finds a job teaching American idioms and is ends up hoist on her own petard.
Very interesting read.
One story is about the "vacationing" Americans and how they are protected from the poverty and living conditions the people who serve their tables experience. And how they both, in their own time, become debauched in their minds.
The second story is a high powered business man, in the business of outsourcing deals, spending his time ensconced in his hotel, afraid to have any part of India contaminate him. His forced isolation works against him in the most interesting way.
The third story is a woman who wants to find the enlightenment in India by devoting herself in an ashram. She is expected to contribute financially and finds a job teaching American idioms and is ends up hoist on her own petard.
Very interesting read.
August 27, 2007
Should be two-and-a-half stars, actually. Well-written, with an eye for the telling detail, but containing too many generalisations about India -- at times, one wasn't sure whether these were the characters' thoughts or the author's. These three interlinked novellas chart the consequences of interactions between visiting Americans and India, telling of what happens when they leave the safety of their hotel room, spa and ashram. Somewhat stereotypically, sex and spirituality play large roles. Sometimes, one felt as though one was reading a nightmarish, updated version of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's early stories.
August 20, 2011
"The Elephanta Suite: Three Novellas","Paul Theroux",
"I have read with pleasure all of Theroux's travel books and a couple of his novels, but always felt that for a travel writer he did not enjoy most of the places he visited, or the inhabitants or his fellow travelers. This book is set in India, and is composed of 3 separate stories. There are some wonderful sights in India, and some lovely people. However he only dwells on the ugliness. The first two stories involve Westerners who get mixed up with people in the sex trade, and I found unpleasant to read. The 3rd story involved a British girl and her misfortunes in India and her revenge. At least this story had a plot! 2.5 stars"
"I have read with pleasure all of Theroux's travel books and a couple of his novels, but always felt that for a travel writer he did not enjoy most of the places he visited, or the inhabitants or his fellow travelers. This book is set in India, and is composed of 3 separate stories. There are some wonderful sights in India, and some lovely people. However he only dwells on the ugliness. The first two stories involve Westerners who get mixed up with people in the sex trade, and I found unpleasant to read. The 3rd story involved a British girl and her misfortunes in India and her revenge. At least this story had a plot! 2.5 stars"
December 31, 2014
I liked this book enough to read it fairly eagerly, but I was annoyed. I have been a young foreign woman travelling in India with a back pack, and I have also been a wealthy middle aged American lady at the guarded resort. Haven't been the debauched foreign business man... Theroux gets a lot right about those experiences, and that isn't even the task of fiction. I guess the problem is that Mr. Theroux's narrative voice comes through really strongly, arrogant and conflicted. I can really relate to feeling that way about places I've travelled, but that unflattering stance would be better confined to the characters themselves.
January 6, 2015
These 3 novellas offered a view of India that is quite different from what I have read in the past. Theroux's characters' views of India and Indians swings from magical to diabolical depending on circumstance and personal expecations. American attitudes and actions are contrasted with Indian needs, beliefs and customs. The results of these interactions are sometimes tender but more often brutal. There are few winners in these tales and the reader senses that those who find contentment are somehow deluding themselves. I came away from this book with a deeper understanding of the complexity of contemporary India with its richness and its challenges.
February 23, 2015
Unsettling read, but very intriguing and challenging. Three novellas that are in a subtle way connected, about Western people's experiences in India. Stories of a dark nature, fascinating all three of them. The three stories kept me intriged from beginning to end. Reading this, India high on my list as to be visited, made me wonder, do I want to visit this country. The answer is still yes.
Beautifully written book, about India, about people's behavior in different situations. Definitely 4 stars for me.
Beautifully written book, about India, about people's behavior in different situations. Definitely 4 stars for me.
March 30, 2022
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I've always seen Theroux as a master of observation, his gimlet eye obliquely and cleverly teasing out many a scene's subtle and often overlooked features. At the same time he can draw out a complex character with a similar skill, zoning in on details and characteristics often representing social mores and cultural shades most people would miss.
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He also has an eye for exploring the typical modern traveller's (as opposed to tourist) indirect gaze filtered through their own often more indulgent cultural baggage. In this way he is very skilled at highlighting the paradoxes and problematic nature of travel, tending to be critical of the so called 'colonist' traveller and their painful historical burden; ironic as he personifies that person, while his Lonely Planet guides, Theroux's other impressive achievement, do little but sell various poor 'exotic' locations quaint appeal to the rich Western World he so derides. Enough digressing!
.
Unfortunately, despite the clear technical literary merits, I also find some of his writing, (like a lot of travel writing in fact) and the stories themselves, just a little bit dull; meandering and simple like a river winding its way rather predictably across a plain to (surprise surprise) the sea.
.
So it was with some welcome surprise I found the first 2 short stories in this book pretty good, if a little odd; almost approaching page turner status! The characters in Monkey Hill seem a bit implausible and stupid but the story holds up, while the Gateway of India is also unusual with its rather unreal central characters, though it sparked enough interest to keep me reading with some genuine involvement. The final story, The Elephant God was by contrast a bit of a dud; the increasingly malcontent protagonist behaving almost as oddly as the plot by the end of the book.
.
So all in all it was an ‘okay’ book; thoughtful, unusual, well written and a little more interesting than the usual Theroux fare. Well, two thirds of it was anyway. Maybe not worth buying, but worth a read if it falls into your hands.
I've always seen Theroux as a master of observation, his gimlet eye obliquely and cleverly teasing out many a scene's subtle and often overlooked features. At the same time he can draw out a complex character with a similar skill, zoning in on details and characteristics often representing social mores and cultural shades most people would miss.
.
He also has an eye for exploring the typical modern traveller's (as opposed to tourist) indirect gaze filtered through their own often more indulgent cultural baggage. In this way he is very skilled at highlighting the paradoxes and problematic nature of travel, tending to be critical of the so called 'colonist' traveller and their painful historical burden; ironic as he personifies that person, while his Lonely Planet guides, Theroux's other impressive achievement, do little but sell various poor 'exotic' locations quaint appeal to the rich Western World he so derides. Enough digressing!
.
Unfortunately, despite the clear technical literary merits, I also find some of his writing, (like a lot of travel writing in fact) and the stories themselves, just a little bit dull; meandering and simple like a river winding its way rather predictably across a plain to (surprise surprise) the sea.
.
So it was with some welcome surprise I found the first 2 short stories in this book pretty good, if a little odd; almost approaching page turner status! The characters in Monkey Hill seem a bit implausible and stupid but the story holds up, while the Gateway of India is also unusual with its rather unreal central characters, though it sparked enough interest to keep me reading with some genuine involvement. The final story, The Elephant God was by contrast a bit of a dud; the increasingly malcontent protagonist behaving almost as oddly as the plot by the end of the book.
.
So all in all it was an ‘okay’ book; thoughtful, unusual, well written and a little more interesting than the usual Theroux fare. Well, two thirds of it was anyway. Maybe not worth buying, but worth a read if it falls into your hands.
June 15, 2017
The Elephanta Suite is a collection of three novellas set in India. There is a bit of thematic and symbolic overlap across the stories, yet they are quite distinct. The novellas are all good. Theroux is a steady and compelling writer, describing how his characters feel and the impulses and instincts that underlie their actions. Details make the backdrop authentic and immediate, and it’s clear the author has spent a considerable amount of time in the country.
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
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
October 14, 2019
I needed a book whose author contained an X in the name to satisfy a recurring bookring I participate in, so I headed to my huge to-be-read shelf and found Paul Theroux and his excellent book The Elephanta Suite. How long might it have sat upon my shelf without the nudge of this reading ring? In this series of three novellas, all set in India, I was immersed in a wash of contradictory feelings, much as the different characters are, as Theroux presents India as seen through the eyes of different Americans who happen to be there by choice or obligation. It is clear that the author has come to know deeply not only this teeming country and its complexities, but also the mindset of Americans who go there, from the wealthy couple seeking an exotic sensual getaway walled off from anything uncomfortably foreign to them, to the businessman who at first refuses to venture from his hotel, appalled by the Gateway of India and what he considers the ghastly ugliness around him, to the young woman on an after-graduation trek with a girlfriend who abandons her and who finds herself in both amazed discovery of self and trouble. The Elephanta Suite is in a hotel in Mumbai, and it appears in each story, sometimes briefly, sometimes more strongly. The stories are interestingly linked in that some characters from each preceding story enter tangentially to the following narrative, even though they play no real role. I was left with the impression that I had been exposed to humanity in the raw, in its glorious wish to feel free and unencumbered all while realizing the impossibility of such a stance in life. Little gems appear in just the right places for reflection... by the characters or the reader ("Most of the world is poor and weak, beset by the strong.") Theroux is a calm observer and a fine writer.
July 5, 2020
A very interesting and bothering book.
At first, I was very impressed by the deep understanding Paul Theroux seems to have of India. And then I was wondering: how could he know all of this. I searched his biography and have not seen that he lived in India.
I have lived in New Delhi for 2,5 years which is hardly anything, and was in a very protected environment. After some time, one starts to grasp some understanding of mentalities, reactions and so on. But I always knew, I was only scratching the surface, that there was much more to be understood. So, reading this book, I had the feeling that maybe, there was in Paul Theroux's words all this complexity and depth that I had suspected but never managed to fully grasp.
I think some insights are really good. But when you finish the book, you remember mostly the darkness. Hardly any of the Indian characters in this book are good or have real values (yes, I know, this is a kind of cultural anthropomorphism). Is this really India? Or is it again a projection of our perception of India, obscured by our dark fascination for this mysterious country? Has Paul Theroux, like so many before him and so many after him, succumbed to the sombre romanticisation of India?
I think there is much more in India that the characters here presented but maybe also Paul Theroux was not trying to show a comprehensive portrait of the country? Though I must say that a lot of the books I have read by Indian writers are rarely light and optimistic...
Well, at least this book makes me think and, though I cannot come up with answers, it will leave a lasting after-taste.
At first, I was very impressed by the deep understanding Paul Theroux seems to have of India. And then I was wondering: how could he know all of this. I searched his biography and have not seen that he lived in India.
I have lived in New Delhi for 2,5 years which is hardly anything, and was in a very protected environment. After some time, one starts to grasp some understanding of mentalities, reactions and so on. But I always knew, I was only scratching the surface, that there was much more to be understood. So, reading this book, I had the feeling that maybe, there was in Paul Theroux's words all this complexity and depth that I had suspected but never managed to fully grasp.
I think some insights are really good. But when you finish the book, you remember mostly the darkness. Hardly any of the Indian characters in this book are good or have real values (yes, I know, this is a kind of cultural anthropomorphism). Is this really India? Or is it again a projection of our perception of India, obscured by our dark fascination for this mysterious country? Has Paul Theroux, like so many before him and so many after him, succumbed to the sombre romanticisation of India?
I think there is much more in India that the characters here presented but maybe also Paul Theroux was not trying to show a comprehensive portrait of the country? Though I must say that a lot of the books I have read by Indian writers are rarely light and optimistic...
Well, at least this book makes me think and, though I cannot come up with answers, it will leave a lasting after-taste.
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