A Journey With Elsa Cloud (Inscribed First Edition)

The author recounts her experiences traveling to India at the invitation of her daughter, whom she had not seen in two years, and describes overcoming misconceptions about India, her daughter, and herself

In a weighty account, kitchen sink included, a proper, upper- class mother visits her estranged daughter in India and during their perambulations through the countryside achieve a better, if not complete, appreciation for each other's viewpoint. Nothing escapes the descriptive attack of Hadley, a blue- blooded, experienced magazine and travel writer, as she and daughter Veronica (a.k.a. Elsa Cloud) travel through the subcontinent in class, visiting the palaces of maharajahs, touring game preserves, participating in some wild Hindu festivals, and finally reaching Veronica's Buddhist redoubt near the home of the Dalai Lama. Keen of eye and ear, Hadley gives a detailed disquisition on India's flora and fauna, history, geography, religions, and foods as well as individual portraits of Indian holy men, intellectuals, and ordinary folk--all of which can leave a reader gasping under its magnitude. But India's spiritualism, its conjoining of asceticism and erotica, its architecture and landscape, principally form the stage for Hadley's quest to come to terms with her 25-year-old daughter's rebellion--which one suspects is not entirely deep-seated--against her materially based upbringing--as well as Hadley's fixations on her own relationship with her frigid mother. Hadley avoids confrontations with Veronica, while confiding her anxieties and complaints to her reader: She wonders whether she has repeated her mother's mistakes in raising Veronica; she questions whether Veronica has inherited the emotional coldness of her own mother. In between, Hadley delivers flashbacks of a privileged if often loveless childhood, her failed teenage marriage, and her unusually adventurous life with Veronica's father, a dreamy geologist who eventually abandoned the family. All of this, including her therapist's Jungian admonitions, are connected in some way; but even as the reader sometimes wishes Hadley's writings were less fevered, one must admire her honesty and industriousness in producing a rather monumental work. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Elsa Cloud is a pet name for travel writer Hadley's daughter, Veronica. In this opulent work, more a quest than a travel memoir, Hadley joins her estranged daughter on a trek through 1970s India to Tibet, a journey that will culminate in an encounter with the Dalai Lama. Along the way they will shop, visit museums, witness Hindu and Buddhist rituals, and meet hippies and holy men. Hadley examines the scars left from her relationship with her own proper and controlling mother as she attempts to understand the causes of the emotional gulf separating herself and her Buddhist scholar daughter. Eventually, a reconciliation of sorts is achieved. For some readers, the continuous analysis of every gesture, word, and visual image may be disconcerting; still, Hadley's descriptive detail is rendered in such lyrical prose and the personal reflections in such an affective manner that even the most jaundiced reader will be swept up. Highly recommended.?Rose M. Cichy, Osterhout Free Lib., Wilkes-Barre, Pa.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.