Word: theroux
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That's true even if you're Paul Theroux, arguably the dean of all living travel writers and certainly one of the most accomplished. In his latest, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, Theroux retraces the steps he took in his first notable travel book, The Great Railway Bazaar, published more than 30 years ago. Ghost Train's conceit is Theroux exploring not only how the places he visited back then have changed, but how he has as well. "The decision to return to any early scene in your life is dangerous but irresistible, not as a search for lost...
...Grotesquerie" is an odd word to use here, because it's in conflict with much of the reportage that follows. Consider some of the places Theroux visits, and people he meets. In Bangalore, India, he comes across two guys, Vidiadhar and Vincent, who had managed one of the earliest call centers, among other things processing mortgages for an Australian finance company. Theroux sets up this section by noting that "in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Indian labour had been exploited for its cheapness. Coolie labour was the basis of the British Raj ... Again I recognized the paradox, that India...
...times, Weiner's gruffness comes off as a strained attempt to stay in the kind of character his book's structure requires, but his skill as a narrator outweighs this mannerism. Geography may not always offer the elegant packaging of virtuoso travel writers like Paul Theroux or Jan Morris, yet I know who I'd rather have sitting next to me on public transportation in Bangkok, passing sunburned sexpats in the bars of Patpong while wondering what it all means...
...Tell the truth," V.S. Naipaul advised the young Paul Theroux in the mid-1960s, when the latter asked him how to get started as a novelist. As contradictory as that might seem - novelists make things up for a living, after all - anyone who has written fiction, or even tried to tell a convincing lie, knows exactly what Naipaul meant. The best tales have the air, feel and smell of authenticity about them, and the paradoxical aspect of good fiction is this honesty...
...possibility of degradation, that makes his people (and perhaps their creator) feel alive. Most modern visitors are content to portray the contemporary subcontinent as a bright and shining Silicon Valley East. Many Indian novelists sit within the cozy traditions laid down by Charles Dickens and even Jane Austen. Theroux is the rare writer to see that the fascination, the power of India today, lies in the commute between the two. His characters begin in manicured, air-conditioned places, but it is the clammy grasp of desire, the smells and the slippery deals of the back alleyways, that really bring them...