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ALSO IN SALON:
No more magic realism
A young Latin American novelist says no more flying grannies.
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A__J O U R N E Y__W I T H
______
BY LEILA HADLEY
BY STEPHANIE ZACHAREK
the cliché, musty as crumbling newspaper lining an old steamer trunk, tells us that travel is broadening. What's refreshing, and remarkable, about "A Journey with Elsa Cloud," Leila Hadley's combination travelogue and memoir, is that Hadley lets the truth of that cliché unfold so slowly and so gracefully that you buy into it without a blink. "A Journey with Elsa Cloud" details the trip that Hadley (author of the well-regarded 1958 travel book "Give Me the World") made to India in the mid-'70s to reconnect with her estranged daughter, Veronica, who was studying Buddhism there at the time. ("Elsa Cloud" is Hadley's nickname for Veronica, who as a teenager once mused, "I'd like to be the sea, the jungle, or else a cloud.") Hadley weaves the details of her trip -- the splendid gardens she saw, the food she ate, the trinkets she bought -- into an exploration of her past, seamlessly linking new sights and experiences with old ones in a vast, silken web. She recalls old loves and idyllic childhood birthday parties, but mostly she explores her troubled bond with her chilly, upper-crust mother -- a link that resonates for Hadley on this particular trip, given the strained, but desperately loving, relationship she has with her own daughter. "A Journey with Elsa Cloud" is the story of a spiritual pilgrimage, but don't let that scare you off: If Hadley strives to understand her own inner light, she's also beautifully in touch with her inner crankiness. She's up front about her tender love for Veronica, but she's also shockingly honest. She deals directly with the issue of sexual jealousy between mother and daughter, and she refuses to hide her exasperation at her daughter's spiritual sanctimony. ("Please don't hug the monks, Mummy ... They won't like it," Veronica hisses after Hadley is so moved by the kindness of a Tibetan monk that she embraces him.)
And Hadley's prose is simply luscious. When she's locked out of a museum she was hoping to visit, her disappointment transforms itself into a sweet reminiscence about her recently deceased ex-husband, from whom she'd been divorced for a number of years: "Can't see the museum ... I know what Robert would say to that, and I let him say it for me in the privacy of my own mind. I listen to him fondly. When he was angry or indignant, his words slipped past his calm, scholarly bonds and enjoined outrageous crudities. I used to laugh at his defiance. Now I smile and shrug my own away." Hadley reaffirms the great wonder of travel, the way it allows you to see anew the bits of your past that you carry around with you every day. Sometimes those bits are emotional baggage, and sometimes they're simply luggage, essentials you keep with you of your own free will -- the things you hang onto because you want to, not because you have no choice.
Stephanie Zacharek lives in Boston. She is a regular contributor to Salon. |
