Tiger for Breakfast by Michel Peissel: book review

Tiger for Breakfast (1990 edition, first published in 1966) is about a man, a dream, a hotel, a city, and a country.

Peissel met the man, Boris Lissanevitch of Kathmandu, in the spring of 1959 when his plans for an anthropological survey of Bhutan were dashed by the commencement of China’s incursion into Tibet. Diverted from Bhutan to Nepal, officials suggested Peissel meet the influential Lissanevitch, the owner of The Royal Hotel in Kathmandu – the same Boris of Han Suyin’s novel The Mountain is Young (1958), one of the first novels I read from my mother’s library when I was 10 years old. The Royal Hotel, at the time, and now the Yak and Yeti Hotel, was “not so much a hotel as a décor for Boris’s sense of elegance” when no road led to Kathmandu and vehicles were carried on men’s backs “not in parts, but fully assembled and in one piece.” It was the first hotel for foreigners as Nepal was opening up to tourists in 1950, especially mountain climbers.

Peissel’s book is the history of The Royal Hotel, one half of General Bahadur Shumsher Jung Bahadur Rana’s palace, managed by Boris since 1954 after his interest as founder and manager of the 300 Club in Calcutta, India, waned and fell apart. The Royal is a hotel visited by kings, queens, princes, princesses, Sir Edmund Hillary – after his ascent of Mt. Everest – famous dancers and entertainers, King Mahendra of Nepal, and even Queen Elizabeth II of England.

Boris, at age 55, was a handsome man, a previous ballet dancer. Born in Odessa, Ukraine, he was also a restless man, an adventurer, and an entrepreneur. He was the number two attraction in Nepal, after Mt. Everest.

The novel is primarily about Boris and his dream hotel, but it is also about the isolated Valley of Kathmandu in Nepal – and the Himalayas and their climbers, the jungles and their elephants and tigers, and everything in between.

Peisel writes evocatively of Kathmandu, its streets and artisans – the expert woodcarvers and architects that made Kathmandu “one vast work of art.” He writes vividly of Boris’s grand dreams and schemes and the efforts in which he brings them about, for himself and others, in an era when difficulties were immense but the impossible didn’t stop anyone from trying.

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