Product Description

A master of the travel narrative gives us three intertwined novellas of Westerners transformed by their sojourns in India.

This startling and satisfying book captures the tumult, ambition, hardship, and serenity that mark today’s India. Paul Theroux’s characters 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 succour in Mumbai’s reeking slums. And a young woman befriends an elephant in Bangalore.

In these pages, we also meet Indian characters as singular as they are indicative 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 more.

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #173654 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-16
• Released on: 2007-10-16
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

Review
“Theroux has long been the most exciting contemporary practitioner of a literary tradition honed to elegantly crafted terseness by Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene. Always a terrific teller of tales and conjurer of exotic locales, he writes lean prose that lopes along at a compelling pace.”
— Sunday Times (U.K.)

“A masterful and mesmerizing storyteller.”
— Booklist

“There is very little that Paul Theroux cannot fit on to a page. . . . His writing skills are disciplined and muscular, his ear as finely tuned as a musician’s, his eye sharper than any razor. . . .”
— Daily Mail

About the Author
Paul Theroux, an internationally acclaimed travel writer, is also the author of over two dozen novels and works of non-fiction. He divides his time between Cape Cod and the Hawaiian Islands.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
From “Monkey Hill” in Elephanta Suite by Paul Theroux

They were round-shouldered and droopy-headed like mourners, the shadowy child-sized creatures, squatting by the side of the sloping road. All facing the same way, too, as though silently venerating the muted dirty sunset beyond the holy city. Motionless at the edge of the ravine, they were miles from the city and the wide flat river that snaked into the glow, the sun going gray, smoldering in a towering heap of dust like a cloudbank. The lamps below had already come on, and in the darkness the far-off city lay like a velvety textile humped in places and picked out in squirts of gold. What were they looking at? The light dimmed, went colder, and the creatures stirred.

“They’re almost human,” Audie Blunden said, and looked closer and saw their matted fur.

With a bark like a bad cough, the biggest monkey raised his curled tail, lowered his arms, and thrust forward on his knuckles. The others, skittering on smaller limbs, followed him, their tails nodding; and the distinct symmetry of the roadside disappeared under the tumbling bodies as the great troop of straggling monkeys moved along the road and up the embankment toward the stringy trees at the edge of the forest.

“They scare me,” Beth Blunden said, and though the nearest monkey was more than fifteen feet away she could feel the prickle of its grubby fur creeping across the bare skin of her arm.

She remembered sharply the roaring baboon in Kenya which had appeared near her cot under the thorn trees like a demon, its doggy teeth crowding its wide-open mouth. The thing had attacked the guide’s dog, a gentle Lab, bitten its haunch, laying it open to the bone, before being clubbed away by the maddened African. That was another of their trips.

“I hate apes,” Beth said.

“They’re monkeys.”

“Same thing.”

“No. Apes are more like us,” Audie said, and in the darkness he covertly picked his nose. Was it the dry air?

“I think it’s the other way around.”

But Audie hadn’t heard. He was peering into the thickening dusk. “Incredible,” he said in a whisper. “I think they were watching the sunset, just lingering for the last warmth of the sun.”

“Like us,” she said.

And Beth stared at him, not because of what he’d said but the way he’d said it. He sounded so pompous chewing on this simple observation. They traveled a lot, and she had noticed how travel often made this normally straightforward man pretentious. They were at the edge of a low summit, one of the foothills of the Himalayas, above the holy city. Farther up the ridge from where they were staying–a health spa called Agni–on a clear day they could see snow-topped peaks. They had come to Agni for their health, planning to stay a week. The week passed quickly.

They stayed another, and now they renewed their arrangement from week to week, telling themselves that they’d leave when they were ready. They were world travelers, yet they’d never seen anything like this.

Still, the file of monkeys hurried up the road with a skip-drag gait, the big bold monkey leader up front, now and then barking in his severe cough-like way.

“Good evening.”

A man emerged from the twilit road, stepping neatly to allow the monkeys to pass by. The Blundens were not startled. Their three weeks here had prepared them. They had not seen much of India, but they knew that whenever they had hesitated anywhere, looking puzzled or even thoughtful, an Indian had stepped forward to explain, usually an old man, a bobble-headed pedant, urgent with irrelevancies. This one wore a white shirt, a thick vest and scarf, baggy pants, and sandals. Big horn-rimmed glasses distorted his eyes.

“I see you are in process of observing our monkeys.”

Like the other explainers, this one precisely summed up what they’d been doing.

“Do not be perplexed,” he went on.

It was true–they had been perplexed.

“They are assembling each evening. They are taking last of warmth into bodies.” He had the voluptuous and slightly starved way of saying “bodies,” giving the word flesh.

“I figured so,” Audie said. “That’s what I said to my wife– didn’t I, Beth?”

“They are also looking at smoke and fires at temple in town.”

That was another thing they’d found. Indians like this never listened. They would deliver a monologue, usually informative but oddly without emphasis, as though it were a recitation, and did not appear to be interested in anything the Blundens had to say.

“What temple?” “What town?” the Blundens asked at once.

The Indian was pointing into the darkness. “When sun is down, monkeys hasten away–see–to the trees where they will spend night hours, safe from harm’s way. Leopards are there. Not one or two, but abundant. Monkeys are their meat.”

“Meat” was another delicious word, like “body,” which the man uttered as if tempted by it, giving it the sinewy density and desire of something forbidden. But he hadn’t answered them.

“There’s leopards here on Monkey Hill?” Audie asked.

The old man seemed to wince in disapproval, and Audie guessed it was his saying “Monkey Hill”–but that was what most people called it, and it was easier to remember than its Indian name.

“It is believed that Hanuman Giri is exact place where monkey god Hanuman plucked the mountain of herbals and healing plants for restoring life of Rama’s brother Lakshman.”

Yes, that was it, Hanuman Giri. At first they had thought he was answering their question about leopards, but what was this about herbals?

“As you can find in Ramayana,” the Indian said, and pointed with his skinny hand. “There, do you see mountain beyond some few trees?” and did not wait for a reply. “Not at all. It is empty space where mountain once stood. Now it is town and temple. Eshrine, so to say.”

“No one mentioned any temple.”

“At one time was Muslim mosque, built five centuries before, Mughal era, on site of Hanuman temple. Ten years ago, trouble, people invading mosque and burning. Monkeys here are observing comings and goings, hither and thither.”

“I have a headache,” Beth said, and thought, Inwading? Eshrine?

“Many years ago,” the Indian man said, as though Mrs. Blunden had not spoken–Was he deaf ? Was any of this interesting?– “I was lost in forest some three or four valleys beyond here, Balgiri side. Time was late, afternoon in winter season, darkness coming on. I saw a troop of monkeys and they seemed to descry that I was lost. I was lightly clad, unprepared for rigors of cold night. One monkey seemed to beckon to me. He led, I followed. He was chattering, perhaps to offer reassurance. Up a precipitous cliff at top I saw correct path beneath me. I was thus saved. Hanuman saved me, and so I venerate image.”

“The monkey god,” Beth said.

“Hanuman is deity in image of monkey, as Ganesh is image of elephant, and Nag is cobra,” the Indian said. “And what is your country, if you please?”

“We’re Americans,” Beth said, happy at last to have been asked.

“There are many wonders here,” the Indian said, unimpressed by what he’d just heard. “You could stay here whole lifetime and still not see everything.”

Customer Reviews

This is a bold and ambitious enterprise
Theroux's new book, which seeks to tell readers quite a few things they don't know about India, presents Westerners whose stereotypes and misperceptions of that country put them in peril. Its title refers to a set of opulent rooms in Mumbai's legendary Taj Mahal hotel; the suite, where the wealthy come to shut out the real India, makes an appearance in each of the novellas. But the suite that Theroux seems also to have in mind here is of the musical variety. Elegantly composed, his work is an often seemingly effortless cycle of themes, variations, repetitions. The mysterious fates of characters in one novella are alluded to in another; a particularly brutal manner of execution described in the second novella is made manifest in his third. All this is performed with grace and economy and without the contrivances one might expect.

Thankfully, there is also a tad more generosity of spirit than is often on display in Theroux's writing. His main characters get more consideration than they might in his travel writing, where they might merit little more than a contemptuous aside. "Monkey Hill's" wealthy, middle-aged American husband and wife, Audie and Beth Blunden, understand India little better than they understand each other, and exploit the country for their own adventures, sexual and otherwise; the crass, 43-year-old American attorney Dwight Huntsinger turns a Mumbai business trip into an escapade of sexual tourism, finding an unlikely redemption in "The Gateway of India"; and in "The Elephant God," the book's most affecting piece, the naive, plain-looking Ivy League graduate Alice Durand mistakenly expects to find in India the same sort of place she has seen in Merchant-Ivory films.

To his credit, Theroux attempts to see India from the perspective of each of his main characters, and virtually all manage to gain readers' understanding, if not often their sympathy. For the Blundens, whose exploits bring to mind the purportedly titillating but ultimately staid shenanigans that one might find in an art-house feature starring a sexually frustrated Charlotte Rampling, India is "not a country but a creature, like a monstrous body crawling with smaller creatures, pestilential with people -- a big horrific being."

For Dwight, it is a place that "attracted you, fooled you, subverted you, then, if it did not succeed in destroying you with the unexpected, it left you so changed as to be unrecognizable." And as for Alice, whose efforts to teach American English to Indian tech support workers offer the book's most humorous and insightful moments, "[f]rom a distance, India was splendor; up close, misery."

One of Theroux's aims here seems to be to provide a corrective to literature about contemporary India, to reveal the underside that V.S. Naipaul -- whose myth Theroux memorably and somewhat self-destructively attempted to explode in the 1998 memoir "Sir Vidia's Shadow" -- is too prim to fully explore; to strip the country of the sentimentality with which it has been represented by authors such as Jhumpa Lahiri, whose work Theroux seems to be insulting when one of his characters dismisses as a "soporific," an "Indian novel, much praised, by an Indian woman who lived in the States." The problem with that unnamed novel, Theroux writes in a passage that is purportedly from Alice's perspective, though it sounds suspiciously like his, is that it "did not describe the India she'd encountered or the people she'd met." As he is drawing his presumably more accurate portrait throughout "The Elephanta Suite," Theroux also seeks to present the remnants of an empire in decline, a common theme in books about the country in question, though here, the empire is America, whose representatives find themselves overmatched in a place they have seriously underestimated.

This is a bold and ambitious enterprise, and one that Theroux pursues artfully, if not, in the end, all that persuasively to this reader, and not only because the one time he ventured into my hometown in 1991's "Chicago Loop," his handful of minor errors made me even more suspicious of his bleak world view I hadn't found that convincing to begin with.