Word: elephanta
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...many wanderers, travel is about transport, and a journey through a world of wonders; for Paul Theroux, as for his model in these stories, Paul Bowles, travel can often be about dissolution, a slow and irresistible unraveling. In The Elephanta Suite, a set of brilliantly evocative and propulsive novellas, he shows us how India, with its furious intensities, its gift for confrontation and its quirky mix of dusty British terms ("jocundity") and the latest American ambitions, might be made for him and his ironic pen. He also reminds us that few travelers can pick up a place with such casual...
...three long stories that make up The Elephanta Suite all deal with New Englanders who settle into the lulling comfort of an Indian sanctuary - a spa, a luxury hotel, an ashram - only to be drawn out of it by their conflicting desires. All three of them start slipping away from their cozy images of themselves, and begin going native on the dark side of town, even as the Indians around them are becoming more like Americans. The fact that the title refers both to a room in a fancy hotel and to a set of movements in a musical sequence...
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