A Journey With Elsa Cloud

by Leila Hadley

Release Date: November, 1998

Edition: Paperback

Price:

More Info

I Can't Imagine The Pain

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.

A study in self-absorption

While Hadley's writing is beautiful, evoking the sights, smells, and sounds of India (and her own life) with intense sensual detail, I found the book quite off-putting. Both Leila and her daughter came across as spoiled and self-absorbed, especially Leila. The story is only about India, travel, and the mother-daughter relationship insofar as those topics relate directly to Leila Hadley's ego--and while you could argue that that's true of any first-person narrative, surely a good writer (one not blinded by her fascination with herself) can hide that tendency somewhat. Hadley's constant harping on her Vuitton bags and other status symbols is so blatant as to be ingeneous and childlike, but also childlike--or childISH--is her complete inability to stop relating everything around her to self, self, self. No wonder others have commented that the inhabitants of India are depicted here in a condescending manner; Hadley seems to have no insight into anyone other than herself. It's a shame to see talent for writing such delicious descriptions all bent on writing about "me". And it's hard to take the spirituality of either daughter or mother seriously when they seem to spend most of their time in India shopping, partying, and sightseeing.
The blurb on the book states that the title comes from the daughter's statement "as a young girl" that she wanted to be "the sea, the jungle, or else a cloud" (and Elsa Cloud thus became a pet name for Veronica). This is fine; kids say all kinds of things like that, and parents often keep trotting out these cute statements. But it turns out that Veronica was SIXTEEN when she said this. That's not cute, whimisical, and childlike, to my mind; it's unbearably affected and pretentious. But that's really my personal taste. I wish Hadley had refrained from publishing this book and just told it all to her therapist instead--but it does have some wonderfully detailed descriptions of Indian festivals and crafts.