Product Description

In this wickedly satiric romp, Paul Theroux captures the essence of Hawaii as it has never been depicted. The novel's narrator, a down-on-his-luck writer, escapes to Waikiki and soon finds himself the manager of the Hotel Honolulu, a low-rent establishment a few blocks off the beach. Honeymooners, vacationers, wanderers, mythomaniacs, soldiers, and families all check in to the hotel. Like the Canterbury pilgrims, every guest has come in search of something -- sun, love, happiness, objects of unnameable longing -- and everyone has a story. By turns hilarious, ribald, tender, and tragic, HOTEL HONOLULU offers a unique glimpse of the psychological landscape of an American paradise.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #466032 in Books
• Published on: 2002-05-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 432 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780618219155
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
Scrappy, satiric and frowsily exotic, this loosely constructed novel of debauchery and frustrated ambition in present-day Hawaii debunks the myth of the island as a vacationer's paradise. The episodic narrative is presided over by two protagonists: the unnamed narrator, a has-been writer who leaves the mainland to manage the seedy Hotel Honolulu, and raucous millionaire Buddy Hamstra, the hotel's owner and former manager, who fired himself to give the narrator his job. The narrator is at once amused and moved by Buddy, "a big, blaspheming, doggy-eyed man in drooping shorts," who is as reckless in his personal life as he is in his business dealings. He hires the writer despite his lack of qualifications, and the writer returns the favor in loyalty and affection, acting as witness to Buddy's flamboyant decline. As the hotel's manager, the writer comes to know a succession of downtrodden travelers and Hawaii residents, each more eccentric than the next. Typical are a wealthy lawyer whose amassed fortune does not bring him happiness; a past-her-prime gossip columnist involved in a love triangle with her bisexual son and her son's male lover; and a man who is obsessed with a woman he meets through the personals. Theroux, never one to tread lightly, often portrays native Hawaiians including the writer's wife as simpleminded, craven souls. But he is an equal-opportunity satirist, skewering all his characters except perhaps his alter-ego narrator and Leon Edel, the real-life biographer of Henry James, who makes an extended, unlikely cameo appearance. The lack of conventional plot and the dreariness of life at Hotel Honolulu make the narrative drag at times, but Theroux's ear and eye are as sharp as ever, his prose as clean and supple. (May)Forecast: A nine-city author tour kicks off a promotional blitz for Hotel Honolulu, which includes a sweepstakes with a trip to Hawaii as prize. More carefully worked than Kowloon Tong, Theroux's last novel, and more familiar in setting, this may be one of the part-time Hawaii resident's better selling efforts.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Every guest at this hotel has a story, and we get to hear them all including that of the new manager, a down-on-his-luck kind of guy whose life is taken over by his job.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Place is crucial to both Theroux's penetrating travel books and his potent fiction. In his newest novel, an adroitly crafted work of vigorous description, complex pathos, and ironic humor, he captures the molten cultural, racial, and linguistic amalgam of Hawaii in a racy variation on the Grand Hotel template. No setting could be more conducive to Theroux's worldliness and sensitivity to loneliness and displacement than the Hotel Honolulu, the last of the funky old off-beach hotels on an island masquerading as paradise but wracked by every imaginable form of discord and woe. Ejected from his cushy life as a successful writer, Theroux's unnamed narrator washes up in Honolulu at age 49 in need of a job and a whole new mode of operation. Buddy Hamstra, Hotel Honolulu's rich, boozy, reprobate owner, anoints him hotel manager, and Theroux's grateful narrator soon realizes that listening to Buddy's wild stories is a crucial part of the job. Although he marries Sweetie in Housekeeping--the beautiful daughter of a genteel Chinese Hawaiian prostitute and (unbeknownst to her) JFK--the protagonist remains an outsider, observing life at Hotel Honolulu as though he'd landed on another planet, recounting the tragic and erotic goings-on in chapters as well formed as fables or Poe horror stories. Lust and death are inextricably entwined as characters attempt to control their fates by committing infidelities, murder, and even suicide. A misfit mocked for his reading habit, Theroux's hero watches Buddy's spectacular self-destruction, listens to hair-raising accounts of child abuse, incest, and thwarted love, and wonders if he'll ever write again. Ultimately, inspired by his precocious daughter and a new friend, Theroux's cultural castaway finds a path back to his true passion and discovers the paradise he believed was lost. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

THEROUX IS A TRENCHANT OBSERVER OF HUMANKIND
Few capture the essence of a setting as sensitively as author Paul Theroux. One remembers with pleasure "Kowloon Tong" (1997), a vivid word portrait of China. Once more he renders unforgettable scenes in his latest work, "Hotel Honolulu," set in Hawaii where, by the way, Mr. Theroux maintains a second home.

But this is not the sun dappled island paradise of which many dream. It is instead a rather seedy spot, a down-at-the-heels 80 room hotel on an unimposing byway several blocks from the beach in Waikiki. "The rooms were small, the elevator was narrow, the lobby was tiny, the bar was just a nook."

The owner, Buddy Hamstra, a man with protean appetites, bridled at calling his place small. It was, he said, "Yerpeen."

Resident manager for this haven is an unsuccessful writer who has no hotel experience, but a sharp eye for observing and facile tongue for relating the human dramas that unfold behind closed doors.

Readers will find themselves drawn to the off-beat, flawed characters who visit the hotel, and reminded that Mr. Theroux is not only a trenchant observer of humankind but one blessed with limitless imagination and a powerful sense of place.

Sad and funny and very very human. I loved it!
There's a great premise for this novel by Paul Theroux. The narrator is an unnamed middle-aged writer who takes a job as a manager of a small seedy hotel in Honolulu. What follows is a book full of overlapping stories about the constant parade of guests and locals and a fresh look at what Hawaii is like by the New England-born author who now makes Hawaii his part-time home.

There's a wide variety of characters and a loose non-conventional plot. Most memorable of all is the larger-than-life figure of millionaire and hotel owner Buddy Hamstra, a big man who over-indulges his appetites in life. There's the writer's wife and daughter as well as permanent and temporary hotel guests and employees. It's a collection of vignettes interwoven with reoccurring themes and finely developed people. It's big and sprawling and full of pathos and humor, small portraits of human nature focusing on the themes of love and death.

I found myself drawn into it, enjoying the author's sharp observations and finding myself wanting to laugh out loud. How each character views this world is fascinating and the writer dares to ridicule it all. There's a power in the book that kept me reading in spite of the meandering pace. It's sad and funny and very human all at the same time as it willingly explores such topics such as ethnic tensions and physical disabilities. It might not always be a flattering picture of a place we sometimes think of as paradise, but it sure does seem real, as the characters grope and blunder along in their lives below a constantly shining Hawaiian sun. I just loved the experience of reading this book. Definitely recommended.

Paradise is what you make of it
With his first novels of Africa and England written more than thirty years ago, Paul Theroux remains the best American storyteller around, constantly seeking new ways to explore psychological terrain (when he's not writing his best-selling travel books). Hotel Honolulu is his latest experiment and is wildly inventive, devastatingly funny, sad and perceptive all at the same time. I must warn that some readers will be offended by his bleak sexual imagery (I was), but the overall effect is too great an accomplishment to ignore. One of its many messages is clear: life is about change.

Only Theroux could have the audacity to set his alter-ego narrator down amid uneducated, semi-literate hotel workers who mostly speak Pidgin English, then loudly bemoan a lack of intellectual companionship. It is this narrator, a fiftyish ex-writer now hotel manager in late mid-life transition, who provides the commentary and, like Scheherazade, spins the intricately woven tales of everyone who comes to live at or near the Hotel Honolulu. Eventually the manager begins to be more revealing of his own inner life, which has a decidedly different tone than that of those around him, milder, less two-dimensional. He makes a friend; he admits his love of the printed word and the importance of being understood; he loses at Scrabble; he tends bees.

As the first line points out, themes of death run throughout the hotel. This may be paradise but people are throwing themselves off balconies left and right because they cannot effectively cope with the changes in their lives. Most of the characters have dramatic pasts, but lives change, cultures change and language changes, especially in Hawaii. Even the manager who suffers with writer's block confronts his fear of dying if he cannot find his voice in this new world. It has been a common technique of Theroux to allude to events which may or may not be aspects of his own life, putting the reader in doubt. Although the narrator's small daughter Rose (one of the few female characters who is not cast in a slightly misogynist light), maintains a certainty about what is real, it is not as clear cut for us. A hotel is a great symbol for the unconscious so it is not surprising when the narrator states that it has become his whole world, the perfect place to manufacture stories - fantasies about sex, death and, if you are a writer, about writing.

While not always a comfortable read and no doubt Theroux's darkest comedy, Hotel Honolulu is in my opinion a tremendously original and moving novel.