Word: theroux
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...three days before the New Year in late 2006, and I was eating a burger with the traveler and writer Paul Theroux on Oahu's North Shore. Beside us in the rickety little shack was a quintessentially Hawaiian group of Chinese Americans, African Americans, semi-Southeast Asians and kids who could have been any or all of the above, waiting for the dad in the group to bring over their avocado burgers from the counter. It took Paul and me a few seconds to realize that the dad in question - who looked like a skinny teenager - was, in fact...
...transpires that Vidiadhar and Vincent eventually quit the call center and go to work for another company (or maybe found one, Theroux doesn't quite say) that makes low-cost shirts for big American brands like Kenneth Cole and Tommy Hilfiger. These guys are "exploited?'' They don't seem to be. Considering Ghost Train is supposed to hark back to the journey Theroux took three decades ago, we might get a better sense of whether or not Vidiadhar and Vincent are exploited if we knew what their parents' lives were like. But Theroux doesn't bother to find...
...wittily observed chapter on the weirdness that is Turkmenistan, with statues and giant photographs of the late dictator Saparmurat Niyazov everywhere: "In some he looked like a fat and grinning Dean Martin wearing a Super Bowl ring." As someone who's been to most of the places Theroux describes, that's the kind of sentence I want to read; the kind that makes me think, "Exactly!" (and "I wish I'd written that...
...there aren't enough of those moments. Instead, we get plenty of cringe-inducing inner ruminations (such as Theroux's particularly creepy thoughts on the inherent eroticism of the uniforms that female train-ticket attendants wear in Japan), and breathtaking generality - the best example of which is the bizarre rant at the very end. On the last page, Theroux writes this: "Most of the world is worsening, shrinking to a ball of bungled desolation. Only the old can really see how gracelessly the world is ageing and all that we have lost...
First, there's not a lot in the preceding pages to support Theroux's proclamation that the world is going to hell in a hand-basket. And second, anyone who thinks that about most of the places covered in Ghost Train is clearly not paying attention. The Cambodians, the Vietnamese, the Russians, the Indians - their world is "worsening?" Compared to 30 years ago? If Theroux actually believes that, it tells us more about the author, 30 years on, than the places he has visited...