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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...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Paul Theroux: The Elephanta Suite | 8/29/2007 | See Source »

...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 gives you some sense of how Theroux can charge his compulsive stories with the resonance and craft of darkly moral fables...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Paul Theroux: The Elephanta Suite | 8/29/2007 | See Source »

...Beautiful young men teach foreign guests the "scorpion pose" in yoga pavilions, and then the "crocodile posture" and the "corpse pose." Americans diligently pave the road to their own destruction with almost-good intentions. In what might be a metaphor for the ambiguity of the paradises that undo them, Theroux writes, "So often in India you could not tell whether a building was going up or falling down...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Paul Theroux: The Elephanta Suite | 8/29/2007 | See Source »

...Theroux's strength as a writer and a traveler has always come from his readiness to say and do what few of us would admit to, and it's a safe bet that these gleefully impenitent stories will not be promoted by the American Chamber of Commerce or the Indian Ministry of Tourism. Monkeys are likened to humans in the first sentence of the book, and in one story the only sympathetic creature is a murderous elephant. Pieties old and new are shot down with every politically incorrect maneuver. "If you succumbed to India's vivid temptation to generalize," Theroux...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Paul Theroux: The Elephanta Suite | 8/29/2007 | See Source »

Back when most people stayed home, travel writing was a highly imaginative genre. Ask Pausanias, Ibn Battuta or Marco Polo about the strange creatures and bizarre customs that they, and evidently nobody else, encountered in their wanderings. But modern practitioners - Bruce Chatwin, Paul Theroux, Pico Iyer - have helped elevate travel writing, if not to a science, then at least to an art that values truth. No one has mastered that task more deftly than Jan Morris, 79, the England-born, thoroughly Welsh writer and historian. In more than 40 books and countless essays over the past half-century...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: A Life of Allegory | 6/11/2006 | See Source »

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