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Paul
Theroux is vociferous about the nature of writing: 'There's
a strange irrationality about the writing life. Often
a writer writes just to maintain their sanity.' Fascinating,
then, that he uses an unnamed ex-writer as his latest
Hawaiian hero: exiled from Eden and washed to the shores
of Honolulu, recruited to work as a hotel manager alongside
the astutely named bar, 'Paradise Lost.' Perhaps Penguin's
prodigal son has taken this opportunity to toy with his
concept of personal insanity? As a writer who has abandoned
writing, living on an island that despises reading, our
hero resembles his thinly garbed alter ego. Who knows
with Mr. Theroux? The part-time Hawaiian resident maintains
his trademark wit, mordantly toying with the reader, brilliantly
blurring the line between fact and fiction. Hotel Honolulu
is a pilgrimage, a higgledy-piggledy assortment of shrewd
vignettes that depict the core of humanity and deflate
the notion of paradise.
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Theroux
resists archetypical narrative, instead using eighty clear-cut
episodes to map his hero's trek towards personal salvation.
Each episode tells a strange pilgrimage for one of the
satirised cast from the Hotel Honolulu: a shoddy
multi storied hotel that exists in a very small way on
the debauched beaches of the Waikiki. The narrative slinks
its way through the eighty rooms of the hotel, slyly indulging
in the basics of human nature: sex, life, death. Honolulu,
Theroux-style, is sprung from wanton depravity to quash
any notion of paradise. What is most interesting is the
fact that most of these vignettes are drawn from Theroux's
experiences. One has to wonder how he uncovered a love
triangle between a mother, her gay son and his bi-sexual
lover!
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Theroux
is most well known for his travel writing, a handy precursor
to Hotel Honolulu, however, his recent fictional
and non-fictional works have been subject to critical
scepticism. Theroux published My Other Life, a
novel featuring a fictional character named Paul Theroux
after an earlier work, My Secret History, was labelled
a not-so-subtle autobiography. Cleverly, he continues
this game in Hotel Honolulu with sly similarities
of character and reference to real people. Leon Edel,
real life biographer of Henry James and friend of Theroux,
makes an appearance, and is, indeed, the only character
to escape Theroux's scathing eye.
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