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Please go to Paul Theroux.com's new site, Paul TherouxFree Computer Help Forum Welcome to the Hotel Honolulu, a down-at-the-heels
tourist place on a back street two blocks from the beach at Waikiki,
where middle America stays and dreams. Like the Canterbury pilgrims,
every guest in this eighty-room hotel has come in search of
something— sun, love, happiness, un-namable longing— and
everyone has a story. Honeymooners, vacationers, wanderers,
mythomaniacs, soldiers, and families all land at the Hotel Honolulu.
But the hotel is as suited to being a crime scene as a love nest.
Fortunately, our keen-eyed narrator , a writer down on his luck, is
there to relate all the comings and goings. He’s lost money,
friends, house, and family, and he has no experience running a
hotel. But all that doesn’t stop Buddy, the boozy owner of the
place— the last of a dying breed— from signing him on as
manager. It isn’t long before the hotel expands to encompass the
narrator’s whole universe. His original plan of escape from a life
of the mind becomes something altogether different: a way to return
to the world he left, the world of imagined life.
No one but Paul Theroux could write this romp
of a book, with its acutely drawn characters and canny insights into
a place that is often viewed as a simple island paradise. In this
unforgettable novel, Theroux shows us a funny languid floating
world, island style. This is the essence of Hawaii as it has never
been depicted, and it is also the heart of America. |
