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 enlarge | Author: Paul Theroux
Publisher: Penguin Books
Category: Book
List Price: $15.60
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Avg. Customer Rating:  33 reviews
Sales Rank: 847758
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 432
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 7.7 x 4.8 x 1.1
ISBN: 0140249796
Dewey Decimal Number: 910
EAN: 9780140249798
ASIN: 0140249796
Publication Date: June 1999
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| Customer Reviews:
"The journey, not the arrival, matters; the voyage, not the landing." June 22, 2006
10 out of 10 found this review helpful
In 1979, Paul Theroux departed from his childhood home in Medford, Massachusetts, and began his train journey from the East Coast of the United States to Patagonia, on the southern tip of Argentina. A seasoned traveler, fluent in Spanish, Theroux brings to life his trip through the northern and southern hemispheres, traveling without a schedule and observing his fellow passengers on the train and people at stops along the way.
In Texas he is astonished at the contrasts between Laredo on the Texas side of the Rio Grande and Nuevo Laredo across the border in Mexico, commenting on society and governments. Traveling through Mexico and Guatemala, he observes the poverty of the Indians and their lack of opportunities. In El Salvador he attends a soccer game and gets caught up in the melee and riots which follow it. In Costa Rica, the cleanest country he has visited, he finds himself stuck on the train with Mr. Thornberry, a New Hampshire tourist so boring that Theroux cannot wait to escape him--only to have Mr. Thornberry "save his life" by offering him a place to stay upon his arrival in Limon. In Panama he meets the "Zonians," from the Canal Zone, and in Cali, Colombia, he meets a married "priest" who cannot tell his devout mother in Belfast that he has "left" the church to marry and have children.
Throughout his trip, Theroux reads classics, particularly enjoying Boswell's Life of Dr. Johnson and Edgar Allen Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, both of which provide ironic reference points for his own journey. For literature lovers, the most fascinating section occurs in Buenos Aires, where Theroux spends many days visiting blind writer Jorge Luis Borges, who persuades Theroux to read to him. Ironically, one of Borges's favorite novels is The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. As Theroux takes notes on his meetings with Borges, he becomes Borges's Boswell.
More an observer than a participant, Theroux has an unfortunate air of superiority about what he sees and hears. Sparing little sympathy for American and German tourists, he rarely gets excited about his surroundings, expressing genuine emotion only when he talks with three boys, ages ten to twelve, who live in a doorway and scavenge for food because their rural families have abandoned them. Theroux's self-congratulatory attitude gets a bit wearisome, but the picture of Central and South America, thirty years ago, and the section with Borges are unparalleled. With beautiful, carefully observed prose and a great ear for dialogue, Theroux's Patagonia Express is a landmark travel memoir. n Mary Whipple
 you can forgive Paul Theroux February 9, 2006
14 out of 14 found this review helpful
A remark that one reads often about Paul Theroux is that he is grouchy, critical of the people he meets, and generally unpleasant. Some readers seem to suggest that this makes him a worse traveler, not being pure-of-heart or sufficiently open-minded. On the other hand, some others suggest he is worth reading as a travel writer precisely because he's not afraid to tell-it-like-it-is. I think it is likely that both of these ideas are wrong.
When Paul Theroux writes a travel book, he is not a journalist writing simply to produce a faithful depiction of the places he visits. He is not a social crusader writing in order educate the reader about the lives of the poor or to stimulate the reader to see the richness of life outside of North American. He certainly is not an egotist like Thomas Friedman who writes in order to put himself in a positive light. He is simply an intelligent man who has enough humility to try to write down what he has experienced without drawing too many clumsy conclusions or false symmetries. When he writes that he didn't like a certain person sleeping in his train compartment, he doesn't expect the reader to sympathize with either him or the unpleasant companion. I don't think he means to argue that his dislike has any special significance beyond the fact that it was part of the travel story that he is telling. I like the fact that when Theroux narrates an encounter with someone in his travels he doesn't smooth out the details to make the encounter unambiguously positive or negative. For example, when he describes meeting Jorge Borges, the Argentine writer, he clearly admires Borges' memory and sensitivity and yet he doesn't avoid commenting on Borges' stuttering and his clowning smile. And yet again I don't think Theroux's remarks are meant to be cynical or knowing. When he tells-it-like-it-is he is not trying to steer an intellectual or moral high road and he is not valiantly trying to see past illusions. I believe that when he writes down a conversation or encounter he intends only to include his side as one of the characters in his story.
Theroux has the patience to travel by train across a hemisphere and, thankfully for this reader, he has the patience to delay the moment when the mind can no longer calmly observe and rashly commits itself to streamlined answers and silly pet theories about what one sees and what it 'really' means. His books are, to me, humble because in them he shows us moments when he feels superior and they are wise because he doesn't try to step outside of his story to engage in falsely-wise pronouncements.
It doesn't matter whether Paul Therous is a 'good' traveler or not. Few travelers have the writing ability to produce any sort of record of their travels anyway, whatever their nature. The reason one ought to read Paul Theroux is be reminded of what the world and oneself can look like through the eyes of an ardent traveler who just happens to love books a bit more than he loves people.
Paul Theroux - Travel Writer Extraordinaire! January 12, 2006
8 out of 10 found this review helpful
For me, discovering a new author is like happening upon a gem of a restaurant that serves up a fascinating new concatenation of spices and flavors. Paul Theroux is the flavor of the month for me. I recall that several years ago I read his book about traveling along the perimeter of the Mediterranean - The Pillars of Hercules. I loved the book, and picked up used copies of some of his other titles. These volumes I placed on one of the many shelves in my home that I have mentally labeled: "To Be Read When I Can Find The Time"! In the past few weeks, I took the time to read two of those volumes, and I could not be more pleased.
Let me offer you a soupcon from one of his travel books, and another morsel from one of his novels.
How can you not love a travel book that begins on a cold winter's day on the Orange Line on Boston's legendary T - and ends in the wilds of Argentina's Patagonia region. I have had a fascination with Patagonia since my days of studying French at Governor Dummer Academy under the tutelage of Roy A. Ohrn. R.A.O., as he was called by all the students, had been educated at The Sorbonne, and taught in the classic style. IF he caught a student daydreaming in class, he would exclaim: "Monsieur, vous tes en Patagonie!" I am sure this was a subliminal reason for my picking up a paperback copy of The Old Patagonian Express - By Train Through The Americas.
Theroux takes us to Guatemala:
"Now there were volcanoes all around us, or volcanic hills with footstool shapes that the Mexicans call `little ovens.' It was cooler, and as the sun grew pinker and a ridge of hills rose to meet it where it hovered drawn to the shape of a chalice, near the Pacific, the gathering darkness threw halftones across the hills. The fragments of white were the hats and shirts of cane cutters marching home. But it was not an ordinary jungle twilight, with the mold of shadow under wide, gleaming leaves, flickering hit fires, and the jostlings of mottled pigs and goats. The sky was in flames far off, and when we came closer, the fire was revealed as enormous: bonfires of waste cane burned in sloping fields and sent up cloud tides that were purple and orange and crimson; they floated and lost their color, becoming white until the night absorbed them. Then this smoke fogged the tracks and it was as if we were traveling on some antique steam locomotive in a mountain pass in Asia, through fog that smelled of stale candy. We roared by and left three men, still hungry on the tracks, ploddingly watching the tail lights wizen and converge, slipping gimleted and neatly out of sight." (Page 104)
"Churches were built - a dozen of Spanish loveliness, with slender steeples and finely furnished porches and domes. The earth shook - not much, but enough to split them. Tremors left cracks between windows and separated, in the stained glass of those windows, the shepherd from his brittle flock, the saint from his gold staff, the martyr from his persecutors. Christs were parted from their crosses, and the anatomy of chapel Virgins violated as their enameling, the porcelain white of faces and fingers, shattered, sometimes with a report that startled the faithful in their prayers. The windows, the statues, the masonry, were mended; and gold leaf was applied thickly to the splintered altars. It seemed the churches had been made whole again. But the motion of the earthquakes had never really ceased." (Page 105)
"Anyone who finds a frenzied secularity at a church service in Guatemala - and thinks it should be stamped out - ought to go to the North End of Boston on the feast day of Saint Anthony and consider the probability of redemption n the scuffles of ten thousand Italians frantically pinning dollar bills to the cassock of their patron saint, who is borne on a litter past pizza parlors and mafia hangouts in a procession headed by a wailing priest and six smirking acolytes. Compared to that, the goings-on at La Merced were solemn." (Page 107)
I admire that kind of writing. It brought back to me the sounds and smells and sights of Haiti.
In addition to being a prolific traveler who writes prosaically about his travels, Theroux has penned over a dozen novels, including "The Mosquito Coast" that was made into a film that starred Harrison Ford. I just finished reading My Secret History - a thinly veiled fictionalized autobiography of Theroux. He tells the story of a writer from Boston whose habit of living double lives follows him around the world and throughout his life.
Theroux sets an elegiac tone even before launching his story, as he opens the book with this epigram, quoting A.E. Housman:
Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain:
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
Through the eyes of his protagonist, Andre Parent, Theroux comments knowingly on the complexities of the human condition:
"But nothing is worse than disgrace. It is lonely and irreversible - a terrible mess. The loud snorting laughter it produces is worse than anguish. Having to live through disgrace is worse than dying." (Page 69)
It is my understanding that Theroux, this son of Boston, now lives in Hawaii. I hope the day will come when he returns to the Hub so we can swap stories with each other while bumping along on the Orange Line!
Al
Not the usual travel book December 30, 2005
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
I like all of the Theroux books. He is not flattering, he simply describes what he experiences. When he finds something displeasing, he says so. And that is missing in so many travel books.
Theroux doesn't bore with cautions and warnings, he doesn't make pretty was isn't. When it is uncomfortable he says it's uncomfortable. When he finds it ugly or distasteful, he says so.
I have traveled many of the places he describes, and reading The Patagonia Express, I could relive many of my own experiences. He is not sugar-coated, neither am I. He doesn't shrink away from hard experiences and misery, neither do I. He travels exactly the way the locals travel, so do I.
Being squeezed in between six people on a seat made for three isn't "fun", but it is reality. And being between these people who haven't bathed in days isn't fun either, but it is reality. It is a good reality and readers should realize that most of the world doesn't live like we do.
This - or any of his books - is not for the superficial traveler. It isn't for someone who just wants pretty or enjoys blinders as not to recognize that the majority of humanity lives is true poverty.
Theroux is a wonderful writer who knows how to bring the real world very close.
 train wreck all the way October 21, 2005
5 out of 15 found this review helpful
Ok I agree with what most other reviewers have to say a disaster from the start, he should have flown to Patagonia and saved us the anguish of laboring through his journey. It was condescending and degrading in its description, being a former PCV and an extensive traveller I would definately not degrade those around me for being poor.
It would make an amazing diary, if someone else had written it! I was barely able to read the 1st 4 chapters and realized it was only getting worse and dropped it.
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