Maura Moynihan in the News
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Music and Mysticism, September 7, 2001
YOGA HOTEL, August 31, 2003
The Terror In Nepal, May 7, 2002
A Little Bit Of The East, July 1, 2001
India Has Maura To Give Thanks For, August 2, 1996
New York Times, August 31, 2003
YOGA HOTEL
Stories.
By Maura Moynihan.
ReganBooks/HarperCollins, paper, $13.95.
Maura Moynihan has an unlikely resume: singer-songwriter, fashion designer, actor, comedian and refugee consultant in India and Nepal. (She is also Daniel Patrick Moynihan's daughter). Judging by her first book, however, keen observation is perhaps Moynihan's truest gift. The six stories in ''Yoga Hotel'' cast a witty, unsentimental eye on the complex transactions between East and West. For every mystically minded American eager to penetrate the subcontinent's heart, Moynihan gives us an Indian maneuvering for a ticket out. What makes for ''A Good Job in Delhi,'' for instance, is access. ''Everyone knew that the point of working for a foreigner was to procure a passage to the West,'' thinks Hari, who helps his English boss juggle girlfriends in between tending bar and polishing the silver. Elsewhere, a homely embassy employee falls for a married Indian man, only to realize he's in it for her power to grant visas. The rich Delhians of ''Paying Guest'' use a beautiful American music student as currency in their status wars, and are indignant to find she's more interested in dating Bollywood stars: ''You know these foreign types, you can't be friends with them. They're always using us for something, not just lodging. They come here with their India fantasy; they don't think any of it is real.'' Characters both Indian and Western see one another chiefly in terms of their own secret desires; only in a pair of stories about religious seekers does the veil lift. The novella-length ''Masterji'' paints its wealthy, bored pilgrims in overbroad strokes, but it also describes moments of ecstatic revelation in startlingly immediate language.
MARY PARK