Book Review

By Derryll White

Theroux, Paul (2003). The Stranger at the Palazzo d’Oro.

I have a good friend who loves to travel – Africa, Nepal, India, Europe – she has done a lot, for a long time, and loves it. She also loves Paul Theroux’s work, as he is essentially a travel writer.

So, late at night and alone in Sweden, I thought I should give him a try, and maybe think of her at the same time. I cracked the cover of ‘The Stranger at the Palazzo d’Oro’ and found a quote from ‘The Waste Land’ by T.S. Eliot and thought “Bonanza, an excellent start!”

“Mixing memory and desire” Eliot intones, and that is exactly what I have done for the last two months in Sweden. I thought that if Theroux lives up to that quote then I have a winner here.

The signature story is brilliant. Theroux takes a man in his youth, when he has boundless sexual energy and knows nothing, and places him in a situation where an older woman teaches him everything. Theroux uses the foreign isolation and pounding heat of Sicily to highlight what transfixes the callow American youth of 21. Then he brings him back to the same location at the age of 60, to reflect on his life. Being a little more than 60 myself, I love this story and relate to almost all facets of it. Theroux is careful with his language, using it to set moods and firmly establish a sense of place.

Theroux’s stories have a wonderful twist of memory to all of them. He talks in one of the parallel universes in childhood. He took me on an instantaneous tour of incidents in my own childhood – wondering about women, hunting, finding my uncle’s stash of skin magazines. So many things happened so freely, associations intertwined without reality. Those were sometimes scary times, but mostly really good times. I have to thank Paul Theroux for enticing me down my own memory’s paths with these stories.

I felt let down by the last story, ‘Disheveled Nymphs’, but on the whole I enjoyed Theroux’s writing, his strong storytelling abilities and his constant attention to place. I saw what makes him such a good travel writer. I do intend, in time, to try one of his travel books.

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Excerpts from the collection:

STORY – … I say that my strength is storytelling. What I have never said is that the most resourceful storytellers are the ones who avoid a particular story, the only story the teller has; the very avoidance of it is the reason for the other wilder tales. The source of fantastic narratives is often this secret, the fantasist using a concealment to hint at the truth, but always skirting the fundamental story.

LOVE – I was intense, impatient, game, but wary of being trapped. These qualities made me a loner. Fabiola wanted romance, she wanted me to adore her. Love me, was the appeal in her eyes, love me and I will give you what you want, but to me love was surrender, love was death. In those days I swore I would not utter the word.

WEALTH – There is wealth that makes people restless and impatient and showy – American wealth on the whole. But the Grafin was European. Her wealth had made her passive and presumptuous and oblique, indolent, just a spender….

WOMEN – Women know other women because, unlike men, they are not beguiled by appearances; they know exactly what lies behind any feminine surface.

MEMORY – …I saw everything in black and white, because the past was always black and white, as the television was in black and white; because of right and wrong, no inbetween.

SEX – Mingled in his mind were sex and creation – his writing…. Sex was exploration and conquest, so he reasoned. And the fever of sexual desire gave the imaginations its wild and sometimes blinding fulguration. Sex was also the hot velvety darkness behind the dazzle of his creation.

WRITING – “Happiness is not a fit subject. Happiness is banal. People who read are not happy or else why would they be alone in a room with a book in their hands?”

WOMEN – I could not imagine what was in this woman’s mind. She was like another species: I did not discern a single thing we had in common. The paradox was that this sense of difference made me desire her….

SEX – A sexual awakening, perhaps, but more than that, for sex was just hydraulics, a frenzy of muscle and fluid…. Sex was part of it, sex was the magic; but the bond was love.

DESIRE –The seduction preoccupied him, made him impatient, drove his imagination, helped his writing. At last the day of assignation came, the act might be clumsy the first time, better the second time, a great deal smoother the third time, and after a while, gaining skill, it lost passion.

AFRICA – Perhaps only an African knew how to please such a man, since sex is about power and the African story was about power.

MATERIAL THINGS – “I’ve got plenty of money.” Early on he said to me, “I beg you to believe that the things I don’t have are things I don’t want.”

– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them.  When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.

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