Book Fever
A look at Paul Theroux
By Marcia Loy
November 14, 2008 San Miguel de Allende

Theroux’s prose remains a treasure, equally adept at summoning personality and landscape . . . a superb blend of sharp-eyed observation and pungently expressed opinion . . . endlessly fascinating. —Newsday

Paul Theroux is my favorite travel writer. I’d rather go around the world from my armchair with him than anyone else, although I’m very fond of Bill Bryson’s travel books. For me, there’s no one like Theroux. He writes beautifully, he goes to interesting places and he’s a perceptive observer of human nature. I’m indebted to him for explaining why I take my camera on every trip but rarely take photographs (you lose the experience while you’re busy getting the shot, and it’s only a thousand words. I could knock that off in a morning.)

The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas, 1979. This was the book that started my love affair with Theroux’s writing. Something about Patagonia and a train trip stirs my imagination. Theroux had spent two years on a novel and decided to take a trip from his hometown of Medford, Massachusetts, to the tip of South America. And he did. There were several places where he had to fly because the trains didn’t reach or weren’t running. I’d planned to quote the paragraph where the train breaks down in the wilds of Mexico and within twenty minutes a woman shows up selling bananas, but the first few pages are so intriguing I couldn’t resist quoting part of them.

Excerpt: My usual question, unanswered by . . . most travel books, is How did you get there? Even without the suggestion of a motive, a prologue is welcome, since the going is often as fascinating as the arrival. Yet because curiosity implies delay, and delay is regarded as a luxury (but what’s the hurry, anyway?) we have become used to life being a series of arrivals and departures, of triumphs and failures, with nothing noteworthy in between. Summits matter, but what of the lower slopes of Parnassus? We have not lost faith in journeys from home, but the texts are scarce. Departure is described as a moment of panic and ticket-checking in an airport lounge, or a fumbled kiss at a gangway; then silence until, “From the balcony of my room I had a panoramic view over Accra. . . . ”

Travel, truly, is otherwise. From the second you wake up you are headed for the foreign place, and each step . . . brings you closer. The Man-Eaters of Tsavo is about lions devouring Indian railway laborers in Kenya at the turn of the century. But I would bet there was a subtler and just as riveting book about the sea journey from Southampton to Mombasa. For his own reasons, Lieutenant Colonel Patterson left it unwritten.

Possibly the finest of his many fine books . . . Theroux’s genius is his clear-eyed rendition of a fresh world and the deeper observations he attaches to it in passing. —Chicago Tribune

Riding the Iron Rooster, 1988. Theroux says most people go to China because they find they have a free week. He went because he found a free year. He wanted to travel through China by train. And he didn’t fly there from London; he took a train. If you don’t have a free year, come with Theroux. You’ll close the book feeling almost like you’ve been to China.

Excerpt: It had been a very bad month on China’s Western Railway, where wild yaks on the line accounted for some delays, and sandstorms were frequent. Just before I set off I read in the China Daily that 330 miles of track had been buried by the worst sandstorms for twenty years. The report was precise in its tale of woe: a “force 12 gale” had raged for forty-eight hours, and the “eye-blinding sandstorm” had dumped 100,000 tons of sand on the tracks, stranding forty-seven trains and closing the line for nine days, during which 10,000 rail passengers were evacuated. People died in the storm. People were injured. Vast prefectures of Gansu and Xinjiang were cut off.

But in the way it was ignored by the world and even ignored by most Chinese (it was just a tiny news items, and in the way it was quickly remedied, it was a very Chinese disaster. (The 1976 earthquake in China, hardly noticed by the world, killed more than 250,000 people, and the famines in the late 1950s killed as many as 16 million people.) After the death and destruction, shovels were distributed, the trains were dug out, the tracks disinterred and new sand barriers erected—fences this time, instead of grass clumps. The Chinese had their political dilemmas, and the technological side of Chinese society was a mess (“communications” was an inappropriate word for toy telephones, Morse code and scribbled notes), but if it was possible for the Chinese to shovel themselves out of trouble, they succeeded brilliantly.

Perceptive, terribly readable and wickedly funny . . . a brilliant and riveting read . . . crafted by the finest practitioner of travel writing around today. —Los Angeles Times

The Happy Isles of Oceania: Paddling the Pacific, 1992. Theroux had a chance to take a kayak from Australia and New Zealand along the route used by the Polynesians to settle 51 Pacific islands. He visited the Solomon Islands, Fiji, Polynesia, including Tonga, Samoa and Tahiti, then on to the Marquessas, the Cook Islands and Easter Islands, ending in Hawaii—quite a voyage.

Excerpt: The whole village turned out to launch Leendon’s outrigger canoe into the surf. I carried my binoculars and my compass. There were nine of us on board, including just one woman who crouched at the bow. I sat on the gunwale of the canoe and the seven men were occupied as crew members, two adjusting lines and trimming the rigging, two using the steering paddles jammed between braces, one on the main sheet, one standing at the bow and yelling about the heading, and Leendon alternately grunting orders and bailing the canoe. It would have been hard to sail this twenty-foot canoe with fewer than seven men. We began to ship water as soon as we left shore and, when we burst over the reef, sea water streamed in. Most of it came through the uncaulked seam in the longitudinal planks that had been added to give the vessel greater height and volume. No one seemed worried by this, least of all Leendon, who bailed with an old wooden scoop they called a yatura. . . . 

“Leendon, does this canoe have a name?”

He said the name, Toiyokwai. “It means, ‘Too Big-Headed.’ You say, ‘Do this,’ ‘Do that’ but the person doesn’t listen. They got their own way. You can’t tell them a thing.”

Pompous, Arrogant, Over-Confident. “I know the type.”

Next week Book Fever travels to Europe. Happy reading!