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Aceh did exist, of course, but with 166,000 dead or missing it had borne the brunt of the Indian Ocean tsunami, triggered by a 9.15-magnitude earthquake off the Indonesian coast on Dec. 26, 2004. It was a truly international catastrophe: the tsunami struck 13 countries, killing 226,000 people of 40 nationalities. Five years later, a first-time visitor to the worst-affected countries - Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka and Thailand - might find the wave's terrible path hard to detect, thanks to a multinational, multi-billion-dollar reconstruction effort. Across Aceh, thousands of houses were built with foreign...
When I traveled to Aceh in 2005, three weeks after the wave struck, some 3,000 bodies were still being pulled from the rubble every day. Most aid-workers and journalists saw more dead in their first few days than in a lifetime of conflicts and emergencies, yet it was the living who haunted us. I will never forget a gaunt, dignified Acehnese woman called Lisdiana, who was combing the debris for any trace of her four-year-old nephew Azeel. She had dreamed he was still alive. "He's a very handsome boy," she told me, "with skin...
...With his latest novel, A Dead Hand: A Crime in Calcutta(available internationally with American release slated for early next year), the New England-bred author builds on his distinction as the contemporary writer most responsible for the West's vision of Asia. By staying low to the ground (mostly by rail) and true to his raw, first impressions - masterfully bending the dullest of travel encounters into revelations - he has etched indelible snapshots of much of the globe. His 1973 Saint Jack evoked Singapore in the swinging days before its turn toward a more staid Yuppiedom; Kowloon Tong captured...
...person and on the page, Theroux displays his biases as proudly as his passport stamps. It is places, not people, that always seem to resonate for him more deeply - as in A Dead Hand, where "the stew of Calcutta," as he puts it, overpowers all other subjects. "The cracks showing through the peeling paint, the dirty shutters, the windows opaque with dust, the dead bulbs, the flickering neon, the wobbling rickshaws and beat-up taxis, all like a dream of failure, reflected just how I felt about myself," he writes, in a vintage Theroux description that doesn't quite seem...
...That depth of feeling can still be found in A Dead Hand, with its farewell to one more Asian destination set "adrift in the greasy current with the flotsam of old fruit, rotting coconuts, curls of plastic and, sliding like scum from the ghats upriver, the buoyant ashes of human remains." Theroux pulls few punches and his authorial hand, like his wandering eye, seems far from stilled...