The stranger at the Plazzo d'Oro : and other stories / Paul Theroux

Theroux is justifiably renowned as one of our foremost chroniclers of the expatriate experience. In this collection of stories, he once again proves his adeptness at exploring otherness--whether the setting is a hotel in Taormina, the streets of Boston, a cottage in South Africa, or a luxurious home in Hawaii. The connecting thread is the power of desire-its thrills, its dangers, and its rewards. The title story focuses on a 60-year-old man who returns to the hotel where, 40 years prior, he was seduced by a mysterious German grafin (countess). With this return to the past, he learns that " at sixty you have no secrets, nor does anyone else." In Boston, a young Catholic boy becomes acquainted with the first stirrings of desire and the dangerous path it can take. And so it goes with an Afrikaaner writer who falls in love/lust with a black schoolteacher and a wealthy retired lawyer who finds himself enamored of his Hawaiian housekeepers. What becomes clear here is that human desire is the true universal that ultimately transcends our separateness.