Word: theroux
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...Paul Theroux's 20th novel, My Other Life (Houghton Mifflin; 456 pages; $24.95), begins on a decidedly unpropitious note, an Author's Note, in fact, in which Theroux describes his novel as "an imaginary memoir" and goes on to say that "even an imagined life resembles one that was lived; yet in this I was entirely driven by my alter ego's murmur of 'what if?'" Groaning seems a proper response at this point. Oh boy, another self-regarding writer playing solipsistic games for his own amusement. Anything good on the tube...
...Pillars of Hercules (Putnam; 509 pages; $27.50), Theroux records a grand tour of the Mediterranean, from Gibraltar to Tangier the long way around--that is to say, via the Spanish coast, Corsica, Albania and several points east, aboard wheezing buses, cranky trains and (once) a luxury cruise ship larded with rich Americans. Fans of previous Theroux travelogs like The Happy Isles of Oceania will relish some familiar ingredients. There is, for starters, his dazzling prose, which in a flick of a paragraph can shift from lowly growls of disgust to images of seascape with the allusive force of poetry...
...broken marble, a place where you were harangued in a high-minded way about Ancient Greek culture while some swarthy little person picked your pocket." Then there is Albania, with its blighted trees, hectoring beggars and vandalized shacks of houses. This Third World country in Europe's midst, Theroux notes, "was brutalized, as though a nasty-minded army had swept through, kicking it to bits...
...Theroux speculates that as the Mediterranean's cities have grown larger physically, they have become smaller-minded and monoglot. Alexandria, as novelist Lawrence Durrell put it, was once home to "five races, five languages, a dozen creeds." Now it is a dull port of Arabic-speaking Arabs bound by one creed, Islam. Theroux finds the same dreary uniformity in other cities: "It was hard to imagine a black general named Othello living in Venice now," despite all the Senegalese selling trinkets near the Grand Canal...
...Theroux's ethnic snobbery is a tired act by now, but his his eyes remain open to beauty as well as squalor. The sensuous Alexandria of old, he notes, was a city "so purple, with Nubian slaves, child brothels, and cabals and nearly always someone in the Casbah wailing with meningitis." One can almost forgive the racist undercurrents of a writer who can pen a sentence like that...