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Summary: Beautiful Writing
Review: A Journey with Elsa Cloud was such a beautifully written book and a real soul-searching journey. Leila Hadley's keen eye for detail and beauty is quite astonishing! I thought the book painted an incredibly vivid picture of India and it's magic
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Summary: An exhausting trip with a narcissist.
Review: A tedious 600 pages of boring self absorbtion.This book flounders in 100's of pages of endless and trivial details,lacking any psychological insight into Ms Hadley's relationship with India,Indians,her daughter or herself.Indians are embarassingly described in a racist and cartoon-like way.There are also a number of untruths,for example Ms Hadley says she met certain Tibetan lamas in India,such as Chogyam Trungpa,who lived in Colorado at that time not in India.In what sounds like envy of her daughter's friends,students of Buddhism are described as being junkies.She describes her own daughter continously with a mixture of condescension and contempt,ridiculing her child's values,clothes.choices,Buddhist practice, all the while professing hurt that the daughter doesnt meet the mother's needs.A lot of the book is spent detailing the author's life as a professional victim.The writing often descends into a sort of word dementia that reads like manic gibberish....Could it be that any favorable reviews this book received were due to the fact that Ms Hadley is married to the son of the founder of Time Magazine?
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Summary: dreary and overrated
Review: I am glad that I did not actually spend money buying this book (it was given to me). I suspect that the reviewers who wrote the gushful blurbs on the dust cover, Gloria Vanderbilt and Norman Mailer and Lance Morrow, must go to the same glitzy social parties in New York as Ms. Hadley and exchange favors with each other for them to write such panegyrics.
The book is long-winded, overrated, and dreary. I couldn't get through even the first half of the book by this egocentric, gas-bag authoress.
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Summary: I Can't Imagine The Pain
Review: I can't imagine the pain this mother feels as she attempts yet again to connect with her daughter. There are reviews here that are clearly from Victoria and her friends and they are noted by curse words that are too personal to be from just a reader.
Leila may be married to a publishing heir but Victoria in her scathing personal vendetta fails to mention he had nothing to do with it's publishing.
When you think of Victoria's unsuccessful personal life and extensive drug use and psychosis and then read how she feels her mother is jealous of her, one can feel only pity.
This book made me want to go to India, I could "feel" the country and "taste" the sweets as she has a knack for describing with intense feeling. That's what the reviews should be about, the book,
The struggle to connect with a selfish, long winded, pious daughter is commendable but hopefully Ms. Hadley will accept that some people should be kept at a distance.
She has plenty of readers who see the book for what it was, a book about travel, travel on land and travel through the soul.
Ms. Hadley had the courage to share that journey in her book, a courage not shared by Victoria who prefers to blame her mother for every one of her personal failures.
Kudos to Leila Hadley for surviving Elsa's Clouded Journey.
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Summary: Couldn't touch "Beloved" with a ten foot pole!
Review: I fell into this book head first as it was highly recommended by my best friend. About halfway through, it just lost all momentum and sputtered to a dead halt. I wonder if the author was bored with all her money and spare time and decided to become a writer to ease her rich b**ch boredom! To be fair, there were some good descriptive passages of India, but that's about all I could say of redeeming value. Because I had put out my hard earned money for this tome, I forced myself to finish it. Lord have mercy on Ms. Hadley's poor daughter if she inherits her mother's neurotic philosophy of life.
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Summary: my perspective
Review: I have read all previous review comments on this book and while others are entitled to their own often negative opinions of Ms. Hadley and "A Journey with Elsa Cloud," I am half-way through the journey and I want input.It is true that the book often feels weighty, and sometimes I am bored. But in Ms. Hadley's defense, she's welcome to share her life - in fact is entitled to tell her story as she feels SHE'S lived it, warts and all. I think it's honest and I applaud her for it. She has a keen eye for observing herself, her daughter, and the often tough interactions which take place between them. Some relationships DO bristle. Mothers and daughters can love each other and STILL mix like oil and water in attitude, personality, lifestyle, and perspective. Leila Hadley seems to own her life's blessings, pain, humor, and, in many ways, lack of fulfillment, her Louie V. luggage gripped firmly in one hand, and her silver spoon lodged securely in the other. I appreciate her descriptions.
Rating:
Summary: my perspective
Review: I have read all previous review comments on this book and while others are entitled to their own often negative opinions of Ms. Hadley and "A Journey with Elsa Cloud," I am half-way through the journey and I want input. It is true that the book often feels weighty, and sometimes I am bored. But in Ms. Hadley's defense, she's welcome to share her life - in fact is entitled to tell her story as she feels SHE'S lived it, warts and all. I think it's honest and I applaud her for it. She has a keen eye for observing herself, her daughter, and the often tough interactions which take place between them. Some relationships DO bristle. Mothers and daughters can love each other and STILL mix like oil and water in attitude, personality, lifestyle, and perspective. Leila Hadley seems to own her life's blessings, pain, humor, and, in many ways, lack of fulfillment, her Louie V. luggage gripped firmly in one hand, and her silver spoon lodged securely in the other. I appreciate her descriptions.
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Summary: NY Times 400 Most Notable Books of 1997
Review: Leila Hadley's A Journey With Elsa Cloud has been cited by the New York Times Book Review as one of the 400 Most Notable Books of 1997.
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Summary: Book Tour info and some words on A Journey with Elsa Cloud
Review: Some advance praise for A Journeywith Elsa Cloud:
Pico Iyer: "In Hindi, as Leila Hadleyreminds us, her first name means 'cosmic play.' And what could be more appropriate for a woman whose openness and exuberance are a model for us all? In A Journey with Elsa Cloud, she charges towards India, her beloved daughter, and herself with a sense of wonder, a delight; and an aching honesty that cracks things open within and without. And all of it delivered with a sense of cosmic play!"
Nadine Gordimer: "The ebullient vocabulary of Leila Hadley's autobiography is a spree of images, emotions, places, in which she searches for some gift of self that will bring about reconciliation with an estranged daughter."
Norman Mailer: "A Journey with Elsa Cloud is the best travel book I've ever read. It's more than that as well but let this suffice for the moment."
Lance Morrow: "With her deeply sensual intelligence, Hadley sets off on a spiritual journey, and her prose becomes a kind of fiber optics connecting all that she sees and feels to her memories, her childhood, her rich inner life. A journey and a love story -- and a beautiful work of art."
Andrew Harvey: "Leila Hadley is one of America's great women; one of America's true originals. In this superbly written and haunting book, the full range of her wise, passionate, and always searching spirit is displayed in a story that is at once an intricate exploration of a mother-daughter relationship and a dazzling discovery of the wonder and freedom of the spirit of India."
Gloria Vanderbilt: "A book of exquisite detail, a kaleidoscope, a maze, a honeycomb of sensuous sights, sounds, colors of India, enthrallingly woven into the intimate lives of four generations, each circling into the other's mystery of self -- revealing the brilliant insights of this luminous writer."
Brendan Gill: "Given classic proportions by being a quest actual as well as metaphorical, A Journey with Elsa Cloud is an account of the author's eager, buffeted childhood and her youthful failed marriages [told with] the same unsentimental, exquisite particularity of description as the bazaars and countrysides through which she passes on her way to the Dalai Lama [with] her beloved daughter from whom she has been estranged, and to the longed for emergence of still another self, not necessarily the last."
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Summary: I Can't Imagine The Pain
Review: The attention to detail and description in this more-than-a-travel-journal was terrific. I usually don't enjoy long descriptions of places and things, but Hadley has a way of keeping it always interesting. The book easily shifts in time from the (then) present day travels to when her daughter, her traveling companion, was growing up. It's a fresh, honest look at the mother-daughter relationship as well. I recommend it highly, particularly if you are planning a trip to India.
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