Word: theroux
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THERE IS A FUNDAMENTAL DIFFERence between tourists and travelers. Tourists know for certain where they are headed; travelers for the most part do not. By that standard, Paul Theroux is quintessentially a traveler. If serendipity were a god, he would be its most devoted acolyte...
Berendt's book recounts the bizarre story of Jim Williams, a socially prominent antiques dealer who was tried four times for shooting and killing Danny Hansford, a Camaro-driving handyman and hustler. But the book is no typical true-crime thriller; it is as close to Paul Theroux as it is to Dominick Dunne. Populated by a townful of Southern Gothic characters, from patrician bon vivants like the polo-playing Harry Cram to Williams' canny, football-obsessed lawyer Sonny Seiler to local eccentrics like maid Gloria Daniels, who conducted tours of her employer's mansion, occasionally supplementing them with renditions...
...Theroux worked sporadically at translating Arabic novels into English. ("From this he makes a living?" muttered one Angeleno who overheard the author being introduced at a Hollywood screening.) On behalf of the Long Beach public library, he also tutored illiterates, who in turn guided him to some of the area"s more exotic landmarks. On his own, Theroux discovered the La Brea tar pits, the world"s largest mastodon graveyard, which conatins what he calls a "cynical metaphor" for Los Angeles: the skeleton of a woman who died about 9,000 years ago."Her skull was bashed...
Translating LA has chapters on Forest Lawn and the earthquakes, the misery of the city"s black ghettos, the unspeakable wealth of Beverly Hills. As a writer seeking to capture the spirit of place, Peter Theroux is a kinder, gentler clone of his older brother Paul (The Happy Isles of Oceania, Riding the Iron Rooster.) . For all their sparkle, the latter's travel books are suffused with a sour misanthropy : the natives are usually too noisy or too smelly or otherwise lacking in the finer human attributes...
...Peter Theroux, by contrast, genuinely likes the Angelenos and their homeland, whose eccentricities he describes with easy learning , deadpan humor and precise, evocative imagery. Of the largely homosexual enclave of West Hollywood, he notes that "it must have a birthrate only slightly above Vatican City"s ." Entering the ocean near Santa Monica "was like stepping into the small tentacle tips of a monstrous octopus." To Theroux, "every third wave rolled in like an arched emerald wall, rearing up with a thin white crest -- the oceanic equivalent of a cobra spreading its hood, and nearly as un-nerving...