| |  | Author: Paul Theroux
Publisher: Washington Square Press
Category: Book
List Price: $4.95
Buy Used: $0.01
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Avg. Customer Rating:  31 reviews
Sales Rank: 6423328
Media: Mass Market Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
ISBN: 0671553933
EAN: 9780671553937
ASIN: 0671553933
Publication Date: December 1980
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Condition: PAPERBACK, cover is slightly worn, spine has a few creases, pages have yellowed with age, book is in generally good condition Normal used cover and page wear. MULLIGANS LIBRARY 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed - Books Shipped Out Within 1 business day
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| Customer Reviews:
 Paul Theroux - Travel Writer Extraordinaire! January 12, 2006
6 out of 7 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
4 out of 4 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
3 out of 10 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.
The Good, The Bad & The Ugly July 25, 2005
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
Although I keep reading Paul Theroux, he surprises me at unexpected turns with negative opinions of the way people live, interspersing these into an otherwise fascinating journey. How much can he learn in a 15-minute encounter about the obstacles and centuries of cultural history overcome, the intelligence and perseverance employed to reach the current level, the reasons for the attitude, the challenges of moving past current obstacles? I'm swept away by Theroux's train and I bask in the beauty of places he so wonderfully describes; so lose the attitude, Paul.
 Crisp prose but disappoining observations June 27, 2005
7 out of 9 found this review helpful
When I saw the title and read the introduction on the back I thought this was the travelogue I have been waiting for. I also like to travel and enjoy the process of travel much more than collecting souvenirs or boasting material. I find walking through the main street of a strange place and observing the public behavior of the people and sometimes overhearing their conversations much more interesting than visiting museums or other tourist locations about which I can read from any book sitting at home. When I got this book I wanted a third party confirmation of my ways. But this book disappointed me.
It is about Theroux's travel from one end to the other end of Americas by train. He hardly feels anything interesting or appealing on the many trains he takes or the people he meets. He takes all in as a necessary evil so that he could write a book. When ever people offer him opportunities to get out of his self absorption he rebuffs them and if this is not enough calls them idiots. While spending a great deal of time in interpreting his enlightened reading material for us he seems content to call poor miserable and hot weather unbearable. If I believed that calling the poor miserable would make them rich I would have enjoyed the content of his descriptions much more.
Here comes the best part of the book. His clear, precise prose and his ability to work with short dialogues to give as a prejudiced but clear picture. In this sense this book is a very interesting read and you feel compelled to finish it once you start. If you are one of those people charmed by clear precise prose with a bit of exotism thrown in this is the book for you.
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