Skunkeye thoroughly enjoyed his brief time away at the beach. Especially off-season, I always get lost up in the rhythm and beauty of life there. The sound of the waves, a long, empty stretch of beach to explore by myself, and how, at sunset, the sand and the water and the shells take on the most amazing hues. And, at the house, the frog orchestra around the pond was in fine form and I saw a family of deer prancing around. Maybe I'm not such a city boy after all.

So nice to be at the beach worry-free, without reality nagging at me. Actually I was supposed to be studying for the exam, but of course spent the whole time daydreaming and reading.

Skunkeye gave Hotel Honolulu to my Dad a while back as gift. And somehow, across the continents and the seas, the book made it back to me. We both enjoy reading Paul Theroux. He's written extensively about places we've lived and visited and loved and been perplexed by and often know very well. We’ve spent many holidays in Hawaii and it seems like my folks go there at least once a year for a conference so we could really relate to Hotel Honolulu Its really one of those laugh out loud reads.

Theroux always seems to bring his own nastiness to his travelogues and semi-autobiographical novels, tainting his observations of each far-flung locale. The man is perpetually seething from a divorce or some kind of screw-up in his personal life. From Patagonia to London and the South China Sea, dispensing shrewd, biting, and often poignant observations, Theroux tends to color his observations with his own dreck..

What I liked about Hotel Honolulu is that Theroux brings less of his own jadedness, and, well, his Skunkeye, to the mix. This time he really listens, trying to decipher the pidgin spoken around him - and makes an honest effort to understand. Honolulu Hotel is ultimately about storytelling, how we all chose the words and details and that define and establish our own histories

What a brilliant cast of characters! Buddy Hamstra, the bawdy, drunk owner of Hotel Honolulu, who once gave a dog a hand-job; Pinky, the biting mail-order Filipina bride; Puamana, the prostitute who escaped from a convent on the Mainland; her daughter, Sweetie, the product of a one night with JFK; Roland Miranda, the long-term resident who fashions an elaborate coffin in his room and then dies in it; Amo the flower arranger and his lover, Chip, son of the society columnist grande dame - I've known a Madame Ha in every city. Every one at the Hotel Honolulu has a colorful and involving story.

This passage really reminded me of my recent experience in the Philippines:

“What I missed most was solitude. I had not minded being cut off from my past – in fact, one of my first pleasures in Hawaii was that my past did not matter. But somehow I had taken hold and become involved with these strangers, who seemed as ferocious and simple and unreadable as savages, and in time I had learned that they had unguessable, improbable histories. I had attached myself to them, and had to listen to its details, even if if it was not mine.”

Comments

[torn and frayed in manila]

Thanks -- I'll check it out. I think he's a much better novelist than travel writer. OK, he deals in stereotypes, but, as you say, what characters they are. "Saint Jack" is my favourite Theroux and is definitely the best picture of Singapore in the 1950s before Lee Kuan Yew came along with a big pair of shears and cut its balls off.

A friend swears by "Fong and the Indians", set in East Africa, though I've never read it.