Word: theroux
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...SECRET HISTORY by Paul Theroux; Putnam; 512 pages...
...Paul Theroux is the writer whose novels read like travel books and whose travel books read like novels. It is not surprising, then, that he has given the matter some thought. For example, in The Great Railway Bazaar, his 1975 best-selling account of rattling through Asia, Theroux concluded that "the difference between travel writing and fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows." He added wistfully, "How sad that I could not reinvent the trip as fiction...
Fourteen productive years and thousands of dusty miles later, My Secret History does that and more. Theroux, 48, reinvents not only his great train odyssey but other chapters of his exotic autobiography as well. The result is the most consistently entertaining of the author's more than two dozen books, a serial portrait of the artist as a young stud that will undoubtedly cause the usual confusion about what is fact and what is fiction...
This is never an easy question (autobiographies frequently contain more fancy than novels), but so far as one needs a guide to the free state of Theroux's imagination, it is this: like the author, the novel's hero, Andrew (sometimes Andre) Parent, was born and reared in Massachusetts, spent a good part of the '60s teaching and traveling in the Third World, and eventually made his mark as a London-based writer...
Beyond that, Theroux's randy adventurer has a convincing, if not necessarily reassuring, reality of his own. Parent is a droll reminder that nature adores deception. His admission that "in order to be strong I needed to have secrets" sounds no more or no less deceitful than the call of any unhousebroken creature who relies on stealth to catch a meal, a mate or juicy material for a novel...