Word: theroux
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Paul Theroux has written nearly 30 books, both novels and travel memoirs. This far-flung native of Massachusetts has never been mistaken for a regionalist. His work reflects his experiences as a teacher in Africa and Singapore and as a wanderer in the Third World...
Ironically, Theroux's nonfiction, notably The Great Railway Bazaar, has excited the public's imagination more than his fiction. Few know he wrote The Mosquito Coast, remembered more for the film version than for the original novel. Too bad, because Theroux is a gifted and versatile tale spinner. He usually writes about outsiders: artists, adventurers and dreamers on the run from conformity. This partly explains the years Theroux lived abroad. Now an ex-expatriate, he is apparently still edgy enough about the U.S. to live near the exits, in Massachusetts and Hawaii. Millroy the Magician (Random House; 437 pages...
BOOKS The Pacific is no paradise, Paul Theroux finds...
Food was terrible everywhere in the Pacific, Theroux discovered, although he was bemused by such oddities as omelets made from enormous eggs laid by the megapode birds of Savo in the Solomon Islands. (His verdict: "The yolkiest eggs I had ever seen.") To be sociable, the author occasionally took swigs of kava, the mouth- and mind-numbing intoxicant of the islands, which is made by chewing the root of a plant known as Piper methysticum and then mixing the blob with water. The best kava, connoisseurs assure him, comes from root masticated by pretty teenage girls...
...Theroux's title, of course, is heavily ironic. Instead of happiness, he mostly finds apathy, ugliness and poverty -- not to mention once pristine waters fouled by industrial and human waste. The nearest thing to the imagined paradise of Hollywood sarong epics is the Big Island of Hawaii, where last July he watched an eclipse of the sun. The experience, Theroux writes, was akin to "the onset of blindness." When the sun returns, he kisses the woman next to him. "Being happy was like being home," he exults, and every reader will know...