THE STRANGER AT THE PALAZZO D'ORO by Paul Theroux
Hamish
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Paul Theroux is a writer who is fascinated by desire
and its place in moral choice and development. 'The
Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro' is a collection of which
the title
story is a novella and the companion pieces reflect
comparable themes. The narrator is a sixty-year-old man
who revisits
Sicily to recover a story. But not just 'a' story -
for the opening line tells us 'This is my only story.
Now
that I am sixty I can tell it'.
Back in 1962, twenty-one year old American Gil, strapped
for cash and wilting after a pilgrimage to the house
of D.H.Lawrence, spies, through the railings of a hotel,
an expensive-looking couple eating a delicious lunch.
At once his hungry susceptibilities are aroused and he
finds himself thinking: I want your life. Already we
know, from their location behind the barred railings
and the edge in the narrative voice, that the young man's
perception of this gilded pair is naive and that his
unLawrentian aspirations to a life which is not his own
will have disturbing consequences.
The couple are not man and wife, nor even lovers as
the young man supposes. Their precise relationship is
one of the engines of mystery in the tale. The man introduces
himself as the 'Grafin''s doctor - she is a German Countess,
while he is a gay Chaldean from Baghdad. Indeed, a cultural
gamut operates : the American narrator speaks Italian;
they German, Arabic and French - the three converse in
a stilted English, at first formally, over dinner, later
only occasionally when the narrator, in return for lavish
board and lodging, accepts the doctor's invitation to
become the Grafin's lover. If 'lover' is the appropriate
term - for what is demanded is emphatic sex, the kind
that requires silk scarves, dog collars, leather belts
and a fair bit of howling.
I confess I felt a little let down by the howling. I
am not an expert in erotica but this struck me as contrived
and - dare I say? - conventional. Of course it is part
of the point that such sex is essentially playacting;
and it also is part of the pathos that the acting is
compulsive rather than playful. A potentially ironic
note is missed when Lawrence is invoked - for the erotic
supremo would have heartily censored such behaviour,
lacking, as it does, any authentic fire-in-the-loins.
The purpose of these dedicated couplings is revealed
when Gil tries to do a bunk after an American girl to
whom he is genuinely attracted (significantly, it is
the first time we learn his name) and the doctor confides
the grisly truth about the Grafin. She is sixty, a stunning
construct of cosmetic surgery, but once the secret is
out she relaxes her hold on Gil and divulges that as
a young woman of twenty she, too, came to Sicily and
met a sixty-year-old man who ... At the story's close,
the sixty-year-old Gil is propositioned by a would-be
whore, who finally places the Grafin's origins for him
and completes the narrative cycle.
Theroux is a distinctive and daring writer but, like
the sex, I found the novella's structure over contrived.
Although we get enmeshed in other's stories are we ever
doomed to repeat them quite so cleanly - or dirtily?
As in the companion pieces, he is at his best shadowing
the fugitive feelings which are the out-riders of desire.
But I was left feeling a little like Gil, who, lamenting
the lack of conversation with his mistress, reflects:
'All we shared was sex. I liked that but I wanted more'.
Independent June 2003
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