Love Paul Theroux or hate him. The Christian Science Monitor loves him - or at least his latest book, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star. The NYT hates it.
Like some other older people, Theroux has begun to repeat himself. Only this time, he repeats a whole book. Ghost Train recounts a repeat of the journey he wrote about thirty years ago in The Great Railway Bazaar.
Some of the reviews say Theroux’s getting to be a judgmental old fella, and maybe that's true. In his last book, Dark Star Safari, he got pretty hot under the collar about folks we found mightily easygoing – the entire population of Malawi.
I don't love it or hate Ghost Train yet. I just opened to page one last night. But we can probably all agree Theroux doesn’t beat around the bush.
He’s off at full froth by exactly paragraph number two: “Little better than a license to bore, travel writing is the lowest form of literary self-indulgence: Dishonest complaining, creative mendacity, pointless heroics and chronic posturing….”
Since he then goes on with 500 further pages of carping and lying, maybe now is as good a time as any to post another of my own self-indulgent pointlessly heroic travel stories. This time in fact, why not Malawi?
I'll post it shortly.
Comments