Word: theroux
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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...
...Writers are often quite different in the flesh than in their books. And, on the eve of the release of Theroux's 47th, it was striking how much an author frequently chastised for snide condescension toward numerous realms and races appeared genuinely genial and warm-hearted. Was this really the same man taken to task for stereotyping Chinese train companions as venal, and writing of Africans that "the best of them are bare-assed"? (See the top 10 of nonfictin books...
...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...
...Given the real author's prolific output, the premise hardly seems plausible. As the story line plods through various seedy revelations about India, what really brings it to life are various musings about travel writing that only Theroux - not his stumbling altar-ego, Delfont - could have come up with. "I 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...
...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...