Word: theroux
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Clad in white linen and a flowery shirt, Paul Theroux looked a picture of contentment during a recent speechmaking swing through Bangkok. Two Polynesian-style tattoos designed by the 68-year-old himself curved from an exposed wrist and sockless calve. Holding court within the quaintly colonial Authors' Wing of Bangkok's Oriental Hotel, the inveterate travel writer and novelist came off less like some haughty descendant of Conrad or Maugham and more an enthusiastic traveling salesman on a first tour of the exotic East...
...colonial rule Singapore developed into a free port where import and export duties were scrapped and passing ships could cheaply purchase all their rigging, provisions, and bunker oil. As the industry grew, the figure of the ship chandler passed into Singapore's literary lore, appearing most memorably in Paul Theroux's 1973 novel Saint Jack, the title character of which is a sly but soft-hearted hustler who sells dreams of romance with female "escorts" along with his sundry goods...
...Theroux's hero worked from a cramped Chinese shophouse and muttered darkly about his tight-fisted boss while sweating in a crowded bus to meet his customers. By contrast Ng sits in Con-Lash's spacious, modern offices on the western edge of Singapore where he presides over a 40-person firm with an annual turnover of roughly $17 million. Apart from the toy models of various clipper ships nearby, his office could belong to a stockbroker or management consultant. Gone are the days when he scrambled aboard ships to haggle over the price of eggs or beer...
...country derided as far too orderly to ever be interesting, a surprisingly large crop of writers has been drawn to Singapore. Joseph Conrad has given sinister life to its mangrove-wreathed port, W. Somerset Maugham has brought murder to its torpid rubber plantations and Paul Theroux has given us the pornographic delights of its Vietnam War-era brothels...
Excavating Pat's diary and the writer's own journal and talking to more than a hundred people on several continents, French grippingly develops an account of the writer's life as cool and undeluded as Naipaul's former friend Paul Theroux's was rivetingly emotional. Though he remains deeply sympathetic to Pat, who gave herself over without complaint to a man she was convinced was a genius, French is otherwise as plainspoken as his subject: the critic Clive James is "an ill-favoured Australian humorist." Naipaul's second wife Nadira he calls "dyslexic, emotional, fairly scandalous...