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World Hotels - Hotel Honolulu
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List Price: $26.00
Our Price: $26.00
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Houghton Mifflin
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780618095018
ISBN: 0618095012
Label: Houghton Mifflin
Manufacturer: Houghton Mifflin
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 432
Publication Date: 2001-05-09
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Studio: Houghton Mifflin
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Editorial Reviews:
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Welcome to the Hotel Honolulu, a down-at-the-heels tourist place that's two blocks from the beach on a back street in 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, unnamable 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 bloated, boozy hotel owner — 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 world. 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, louche floating world, island style. This is the essence of Hawaii as it has never been depicted, and it is also the heart of America.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Hawaii Unfiltered
Comment: Incredibly entertaining book to read. Like many mainlanders, I moved to Hawaii after a great vacation and can completely relate to the book's observations - it is unfiltered Hawaii. It is also purely un-PC, but that is part of what makes it a real article. Will definitely search out more from Theroux!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Odd and Compelling
Comment: I read every word of this book. Theroux's writing skill is incredible. Half the reason I enjoyed this book was just marveling at how he can write. Although not a pleasant, feel good novel, it is a compelling portrait of life. It also brought back memories of my visits to Honolulu.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Brilliantly entertaining in a Hawaiian way
Comment: I've visited Hawaii a dozen times in the past few years, and it took me a while to understand the language of the locals, their perceptions on life, and their sense of humor. This book captures a side of Hawaii that people don't get to see intimately unless they've been there long enough: it's a place where some people just "end up". Paul Theroux relates this side of the island life to us through a mainland howlie who ends up in Honolulu somehow and lands a gig as a hotel manager. This book explores the shadier side of the island in a humorous (albeit crude) fashion. I thoroughly enjoyed this book because of the familiar voices that speak within it (not to mention his wicked sense of humor)! Not for those easily offended.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Just quirky enough to be entertaining
Comment: This story seems to be set in somewhat a modern Hawaii setting. Actually it is kind of like a whole bunch a stories; which is strung all together by the main character (the hotel manager). Since the author is haole, it is appropriate that his character is the under achieving hotel manager. The whole time I read it I just pictured the old Blaisdel Hotel on Fort Street. Some of the local characters seemed a little shallow, but if you can imagine Honolulu in the late sixties you might like this book.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Connecting the Disconnected
Comment: I was going to give this novel four stars but, after reading the bad reviews and feeling how badly they've missed what makes this a great Theroux novel, I'm going to go ahead and give it five stars.
(My memories of other Theroux works is my sole motivation for taking a star off anyway).
Yes, there isn't a clearly-defined plot in HOTEL HONOLULU but the transient lives and lifestyles of the people who end up on that "rock in the middle of water" form a story that feels like a single entity. The characters are bold and vivid. Nothing whitewashed here: old white men rant about the Hawaiians and Asian women and vice versa.
Another wonderful quality about Theroux's writing is that he goes to remote and exotic locations and brings back a reality we've never seen, whether it's the South Sea islands or the dirt roads of Mongolia or the frozen train stations of Siberia...or America's paradise, Hawaii.
Bravo, Paul!
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