He lives with his wife, Sheila, on the island of Oahu, where he is manager and beekeeper for Oceana Ranch Pure Hawaiian Honey.
Theroux is the author of thirty-eight books, both fiction and nonfiction. It inspires Prinsloo to write about a wealthy citrus farmer who, on his sixtieth birthday, acquires the magical ability "to translate what people say to him into what they really mean." In the title story, it spurs Gilford Mariner to return to the Palazzo d'Oro once again, only to discover that "at sixty., you have no secrets, nor does anyone else." It moves a Hawaiian lawyer to leave his perfect island home and follow a cleaning lady to Las Vegas. Reaching this age influences Theroux's characters in strangely powerful ways. The pieces in this collection share another common theme: three of the four deal with a protagonist who has recently turned sixty, a milestone the author himself passed in 2001. The sense of living inside one of his own stories roused and compelled him to look deeper." "Nolo," Theroux writes, "was like a character in one of strangest stories. An unnamed character tells the tale of his friend Lourens Prinsloo, a fellow author who leaves his wife and abandons his work to pursue Nolo, a beautiful and inscrutable African tribeswoman. Theroux wrote The Stranger at the Palazzo d'Oro while traversing Africa for his 2002 nonfiction book Dark Star Safari, and one story in the book takes place at the tip of the African continent. In his new collection of short stories, Theroux's characters likewise travel incognito, exploring the special kind of artistry that comes from being a perpetual stranger. For his first major travel piece, a 1971 Atlantic article, Theroux assumed a voice that was both anonymous and masterly: a nondescript American tourist sharing vivid impressions of a Burmese marketplace. I even saw the painting in a gilded frame, with a title something like The Golden Age or The Stranger at the Palazzo d'Oro, as detailed and suggestive as a Whistler, a baroque terrace on a hot day, a man directing a virile young boy to a drawing room where an older woman, golden-haired like a countess in a Grimm story and dressed in white (lingerie that resembled an elegant gown), looked at her reflection and his approach in a mirror.Īlthough Paul Theroux has traveled the world, from the coast of Great Britain to the islands of the South Pacific, his work often returns to the same territory: the narrow isthmus where life becomes art.
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