STRANGER AT THE PALAZZO D ORO

The story of a love affair between a young man and an older woman in Taormina, Sicily, in the sixties.´ This is my only story. Now that I am sixty I can tell it´ He, the narrator, is a twenty-one-year-old American art student travelling the world. She is a countess - apparently cold, haughty and inaccessible. And with her is the doctor Haroun, her gay travelling companion. When he makes their acquaintance at the Palazzo D´Oro, the narrator finds himself filled with unexpected lust and playing a part in something he doesn´t quite understand. Finally, aged sixty, he returns to Taormina to tell his story and confront the present. Filled with Theroux´s typically effortless but devastating depictions of place, The Stranger at the Palazzo D´Oro is a brilliant portrayal of ageing and decay, and a shocking tale of nostalgia and sensuality in a golden age. Echoing the ambiguities of risk and remembered sexuality, the accompanying tales enlarge upon these themes of age and pursuit - the sexual awakening and rites of passage in an American boyhood, the mirror of a writer in Africa at a moment of crisis, and of a man in Hawaii bewitched by dishevelled nymphs. This is a startling chronicle of memory and desire.