Word: theroux
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...trackers who dragged boats upstream through the Gorges in the days before motor transport became standard. Although trackers haven't worked the Yangtze for more than a decade, they are immortalized in legend and song, and by authors in the West such as John Hersey and Paul Theroux. We have come to Chen's home in Daxi in part because of Hersey's 1956 novel, A Single Pebble, which vividly describes the Qutang trackers' path, a narrow walkway carved into the cliff wall. Hersey calls it "the most terrible place on the whole river," a tempting endorsement for any adventurer...
...Evelyn Waugh, who famously despised every civilization that had not been subjugated by Rome, should be from the Caribbean. Naipaul is also one of the very few writers to have a whole, book-length cruise missile of a memoir fired at him by a fellow writer. In 1998 Paul Theroux, in a striking fit of Oedipal peevishness, published Sir Vidia's Shadow, painting his former friend and mentor as a self-obsessed, avaricious, pathologically snobbish brute. Perhaps he is. If so, he is not the first major writer to be one. Generally, nice guys don't do too much...
Ever since the Old Patagonian Express rose to fame from the pages of Paul Theroux's 1979 best seller, this narrow-gauge line in southern Argentina has been a Mecca for steam-train lovers. "We're still running the same original engines from the year 1922," says El Maiten stationmaster Marcelo Ballerini. "Tourists arrive from all over the world to ride it." Threatened with extinction at various times during recent years, this fully steam-operated line running across the dry Patagonian steppes has been kept alive by Theroux's readers and a few locals who still board it along...
...poems in which male writers imagine life as a woman for 24 hours. With rare exceptions, the 38 contributors belabor the fantasy of dressing up and sleeping around, while expressing a smug self-loathing for the callousness of their gender. A few strive for empathy and thoughtfulness (Alexander Theroux and Brian Bouldrey stand out), but for the rest of these men, being a woman too often means feeling angry, oppressed or prone to tears...
...Indeed, at times the rawness of these letters threatens to expose a Naipaul more human than we might want to believe. Naipaul's friend and contemporary Paul Theroux published a memoir in 1998 about their rocky relationship since the two met in Africa in 1966. Theroux's depiction of Naipaul's egoism and reputation for being difficult is only confirmed by Family Letters. Cynical about the intellectual capabilities of his fellow Oxonians, close to very few people at the university, Naipaul comments to his sister, "It is difficult to exaggerate the dangers of a place like Oxford--the retarding influence...