Word: likenesses
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Theroux makes a passionate defense of his genre when asked what role travel writing can play in a globalized world where much that was exotic seems increasingly like one giant 7-11 franchise. "That's just an illusion," Theroux claims, "because the customs, obligations, pieties that govern the people in that 7-11 can still be completely different." He still believes there's a wide field to be discovered in "dangerous places, war zones ridden with crime or plagues or terror." And he insists "the travel book should give the lie to those who think they can find everything...
...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 plausible when applied to protagonist Jerry Delfont, who suffers from the metaphoric "dead hand" of writer's block. (See the best of Asia...
...would never have lived in this wandering way," the author confesses, "if the pleasures had not outweighed the difficulties ... I hadn't chosen my life out of a desire to confront danger but rather because I was lazy and evasive, ducking out or moving on whenever I felt like it." And he seems to endorse the host of critics who agree that "as an outsider, the traveling writer sees only surfaces...
...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...
Even then surgery is usually out of the question. Many of our local patients are in their 80s and still working. Our patient Tony, 82, is a gardener. He looks like a root: strong hands, twisted by arthritis, five-feet-nothin' and bowlegged. He's been listening to me recommend knee replacement for 10 years, but would never have the surgery. He takes the arthritis pills I give him, but leaves my physical therapy prescriptions on the counter ("Don't need no exercise, Doc. I work."). At most he'll take an injection when it gets bad. Even when...