Word: theroux
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...take as many trains as possible from London to Tokyo-including a few spur lines of the moment-and then back again? This notion would no doubt horrify the hapless U.S. rail commuter and send him reeling back to the bar car. Yet in late 1973 Novelist Paul Theroux 35, spent four months chugging over just such an odyssey. Surprisingly, he not only survived but entertainingly tells the tale...
...PAUL THEROUX 342 pages. Houghton Mifflin...
First he explains the mania that provoked him. Like such disparate figures as Molly Bloom and Richard Nixon, Theroux says he has always been lured by the siren song of a train whistle: "I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it." Thus his trip represented a once-in-a-lifetime act of massive self-indulgence, plus the chance to experience firsthand "the trains with the bewitching names: the Orient Express, the North Star, the Trans-Siberian." As an added bonus, the trips threw him together with several novels' worth of offbeat characters...
There is the Kindly Burmese bound for Maymyo who offers Theroux fried sparrows for lunch. On the way to Kyoto, he meets a Japanese professor whose specialty is teaching a two-year course on Henry James' The Golden Bowl. Depressed by the breadlines in Sri Lanka (Ceylon) he is reassured by a chauvinist from Calcutta: "You call those bread queues? In Calcutta, we have bread queues twice as long as that." During the long, icy trip across Siberia, Theroux is befriended by a Russian who wants to hear all about North American hockey teams, including the "Bostabroons, Do-ront...
Alexander L. Theroux, Briggs-Copeland Lecturer on English: "I haven't been following it very closely. Is Providence out it yet? I'll say this: I'm against UCLA. You could say I'm disinclined to see anything from California be successful. That's where I hear funeral parlors stay open all night...