ETWEEN THE WINES Theroux’s strangers in paradise “Nothing to me is so erotic as a hotel room, and therefore so penetrated with life and death.” Thus begins Paul Theroux’s latest volume of autobiography-as-novel, Hotel Honolulu. The first sentence should serve as either appetizer or warning. This is a brilliantly written book, beautifully imagined, a detached and sometimes chilling exercise in which the first-person narrator, an author who says he has lost his will to write, tries to regain that will by retreating to a seedy hotel in Waikiki. But the salvation he claims to have found at book’s end comes with no emotional expenditure on his part.

That the book’s title echoes Grand Hotel is no accident, of course; the “plot” is primarily a series of character vignettes that only occasionally intersect, though they often shine a cold glitter of inference on one another. Most are keenly observed portraits of the tourists, natives, exiles, escapees and cons the narrator meets through his job as the motel manager. The narrator himself is just such an exile, a man in his 50s who, after “thirty years of moving around the world, and thirty years of books,” is again on the run from failed relationships of various types. (This may sound familiar to those aware of Theroux’s own acrimonious tendencies.) “I needed a rest from everything imaginary,” the narrator says, “and I felt that in settling in Hawaii, and not writing, I was returning to the world.” Yet this prodigal admirer of Somerset Maugham cannot help but flee to a place of bloated fecundity and constant decay. It’s that over-ripeness of the tropics, the heavy scent of flowers, the quick frailty, the vast and pervasive corruption of the motel and its cast that the narrator settles into. Through his job, he meets people who sell themselves and one another, commit murder and mayhem, lie about their ages and sexual proclivities, drink, stink and commit suicide. Theroux is fascinated with these characters, and he makes them fascinating to the reader.

Accustomed to tossing off accounts of people in faraway places, the narrator finds that, this time around, he is the curiosity, “hired because I was a white man, a haole.” Nevertheless, his underlying self-assurance comes through; his precocious and acute daughter is not only his great pride, but seems to have emerged Athena-like from his mind alone, with no help from his native-born and somewhat simple wife. (The narrator’s mother-in-law is a prostitute, a profession Theroux never tires of; and in one of the oddest macho fantasies in the book, the narrator’s wife is the result of a tryst with JFK.) You might say the narrator takes Noel Coward’s way out of the situation, opening every snapshot with an epigrammatic sleight of hand. “One morning at first light, quite by chance, she entered the hotel’s coffee shop in a tight tube dress that rode up her thighs from the heel-and-toe motion of her wicked shoes.” (This being the former novice nun whose ecstatic visions had been not of God but of her incestuous father.) Again, Theroux’s opening remarks in the book serve as both lure and warning. The happenings at the hotel are by turns raunchy, grisly and hilarious. While the narrator makes lots of allowances for himself, pretending that his passivity is a sort of free pass, he trains an unyielding eye on the other inhabitants of this tawdry part of paradise. As Theroux has demonstrated before, in more than 30 books, there are few writers who can lure the reader into more unlovely compliance with his view of the world.

The ideal pairing: tropical setting and a fine Sauterne Such baroque and floral ruination does bring one unadulterated pleasure to mind: the honeyed, rose-gold and pear-scented Barosssa Botrytis Semillon Sauternes from Peter Lehmann. Like Theroux’s Hawaii (and the decaying honey plantation he lives on), these wines are made from late-harvested grapes intentionally gone to high sugar and the “noble rot” that produces true Sauternes. With a clean, cidery nose, a whisper of almond and the slimmest, most elegant chiffon of citrus, these wines are perfect at the outset with foie gras or fine olives (not the bland martini ones, the real things) or at the end with cheese. It’s sold in half bottles; the 1997 goes for about $17.

Eve Zibart is the restaurant critic for The Washington Post’s weekend section. This column reflects her dual interests in wine and travel.

he heart of Africa and the human heart blend seamlessly in this deftly crafted first novel by Nicholas Hershenow, published under Putnam’s new fiction imprint. The team of Greg Michalson and Frederick Ramey, whose Midas touch tapped first-rate new talent like William Gay, Patricia Henley and Susan Vreeland for MacMurray ∧ Beck publishers, now bring their expertise to BlueHen Books, a forum dedicated to putting gifted new writers into print. The Road Builder is a propitious beginning, a warm and wise epic novel that circles the globe to uncover the truths that lie closest to home.

The African journey of Will and Kate Haslin begins in America with a lark, a harmless smuggling foray into Mexico to unofficially export a little jewelry and a few blankets. The joy ride turns into a kidnapping with a not-unwilling victim, progresses into a marriage that begins as a motel-registry subterfuge, and results in a meeting with the man who will put an indelible stamp on the young couple’s life Kate’s enigmatic Uncle Pers. A shadowy character on his deathbed, an old man whose life experience is as varied as it is mysterious, Pers is writing his memoirs and claims to have lost his memory of time spent in Central Africa. Pers sends Will and Kate on a mission to the village of Ngemba, ostensibly to reclaim that lost part of his past. “You have no story of your own; I’ll give you mine,” is Pers’ irresistible offer. The story that unfolds delves into the dangerous secret of Pers’ past while layer after layer of history, myth and culture envelop the young American couple as they come to terms with their own relationship and their relationship to the exotic world of the African savanna.

This is a contemporary story that weds the past to the present, bringing together romance without sentimentality, social issues without preaching, and above all, a rare gift for storytelling and characterization. Although the book is a debut, it displays the virtuosity of an experienced hand. Having worked as a Peace Corps volunteer in Zaire, author Nicholas Hershenow puts the authority of personal experience into this richly detailed novel, but the spark that makes it memorable is his talent for bringing the sights and sounds and the very hearts of his characters to life.

Mary Garrett reads and writes in Middle Tennessee.

sands through the hourglass If ol’ Fred Nietzsche were around to review Simon Mawer’s The Gospel of Judas, he’d probably say with a nod to fellow philosopher Yogi Berra “See? What’d I tell you? It’s eternal recurrence all over again!” I don’t mean to poke fun at Mawer’s excellent novel, but merely to indicate that Nietzsche’s notion of “eternal recurrence,” as commonly conceived, can profitably be used to view it. There may be other ways, but the book has about it a lot of what Nietzsche called the “eternal hourglass of existence” that is continually being “turned over and over and you with it, a mere grain of dust.” Further, in The Gospel of Judas, time is not linear, like the idea of time that has come down to us from Aristotle through Judeo-Christian teaching, but circular and cyclical, like Nietzsche’s time. The novel shifts fluidly back and forth from World War II to the present day, and it definitely has much to do with Christianity.

Leo Newman is a Roman Catholic priest, British but living in Rome. A renowned scholar of biblical-era texts, he is summoned to Jerusalem to decipher a recently found scroll that appears to have been written by Judas Iscariot, the betrayer of Christ. Leo quickly senses that the scroll is genuine and literally devastating to Christianity.

At this time Leo, who is apparently 50-ish, embarks on his first sexual affair. The woman, named Madeleine, is Catholic and the wife of a British diplomat. She is one element in the “potent sense of womanhood” that informs Leo’s life. Indeed, the novel gives off a muted sensation of must more than that, of the ancient fear that women are not only sexual predators but the very occasion for sin.

A leitmotif of repetition and reflection accompanies the time/eternal recurrence theme. The Leo-Madeleine affair reflects the affair that the priest’s mother, Gretchen, also a Catholic and the wife of a (German) diplomat, has with an Italian Jew named Francesco during World War II.

This leitmotif, in turn, is entwined with the book’s and Leo’s obsession with word origins and names. For instance, Yerushalem (Jerusalem), the author tells us, is not from shalom, the Hebrew for peace, but from the Canaanite god, Shalem.

While these explanations are a treat to come across, they amount to more than mere intellectualizing. Leo’s working life is one of words “Had he always feared that as soon as he teased at the words that made up his faith, the whole fabric would unravel?” and, as he tells Madeleine at one of their first meetings, “In this business you always start with the name. Names always had meanings.” Darn right they did, and do. Madeleine is a form of Magdalene, Mary Magdalene, the reformed and repentant whore of the New Testament. So is Magda, an artist and whore with whom Leo later shares an apartment.

A priest of Christ who takes up with two women named for the woman who, aside from Mary, is most associated with Christ. As Leo works at translating the scroll, one of them, Madeleine, stands figuratively at his shoulder, just as “her namesake had been there at the discovery of the opened tomb.” All of this would be mere symbol-dropping and parading of knowledge if the author did not make it so much of a piece. Tightly constructed is not the right term; try seamless. Mawer, author of Mendel’s Dwarf and several other novels, has produced tightly woven, brilliantly matching narrative threads that make up a splendid cloth. And for good measure, the scroll mystery adds a nice thriller element.

Like all good modern authors, Mawer lets us make of it what we will. “Was it here,” Leo wonders as he pores over the papyrus, “that the history of Christianity would finally come to an end?” The weight of the book’s evidence would seem to point to one answer yes.

However, also like all good modern authors, Mawer’s true concern is not the cosmic and infinite, but the immediate and human. The priest of Christ, not Christ, animates this book.

In the final pages we learn that toward the end of the war Gretchen has taken the name “Mrs. Newman” names, after all, always had meanings and that Leo, the child with which she is pregnant, is “a kind of resurrection.” He is also, you will discover, a kind of eternal recurrence.

Roger K. Miller is a freelance writer in Wisconsin.