The Elephanta Suite - by Paul Theroux (Paperback)

About the Book

This startling, far-reaching book captures the tumult, ambition, hardship, and serenity that mark today's India. Theroux's portraits of people and places explode stereotypes to exhilarating effect.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"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"

"From the Hardcover edition."