I look for compassion in a writer: compassion towards his characters and towards the peoples he writes of. I find only contempt in The Lower River. Hock is drawn mockingly in the beginning chapters and then dragged through increasing pain as the book proceeds. Hock has no chance in the world Ther...
I was intruiged at the beginning, especially since our main character is an unusual 62-year-old man who is recently divorced. However, the character's (Hock's) behavior is unsettling and I had to stop reading about halfway through. This is a man who begins the book by discussing the numerous at...
I have never read Paul Theroux before this book and I agree with what many people have already said here. He seems a bit grumpy and disappointed that today's Africa is not the Africa of his youth. Having only ever been to North Africa (Morocco), I don't have a point of reference or understanding ...
The edition I have begins with a letter to a publisher which we would be better without. Because the story is told by one of the characters, Greene points out that Brown is not Greene. Well, I wouldn't have thought of that! Then he notes that Brown, like Greene, is a Catholic. He justifies this o...
I am so glad I picked up this memoir as an accompaniment to my book club’s choice of “Half a Life” by V.S. Naipaul. In this book, Paul Theroux documents an apparently very close friendship with Naipaul, beginning in 1966 in Africa and ending nearly 30 years later with a falling out. During this ...
It has been more years than I can remember since I last read an analog book – an actual physical book that I held in my hands, turning pages and highlighting pithy passages in yellow. My husband recently came across a dog-eared copy of The Pillars of Hercules: A Grand Tour of the Mediterranean t...
The only Paul Theroux I had read before was a non-fiction travel diary called The Happy Isles of Oceania. I was surprised to open this and find it was fiction. And very strange fiction.This is a story of a brilliant but mentally ill man. He has a genius for mechanics and invention, but he is s...
I had experienced Theroux the novelist, but I figured it's about time I stopped resisting Theroux the travel writer. This book contains large sections of 6 books of railway journeys around the globe. I concentrated on the parts from "The Great Railway Bazaar", "The Old Patagonian Express", and ...
The main character is a writer whose only book, 20 years ago, was a smash hit spawning a line of travel-related merchandise. Now he's increasingly depressed that he hasn't been able to write a book since; and in an effort to re-ignite his career (perhaps with another "travel stunt" book like his...
Once when I was telling a friend about all the troubles I had encountered during a visit to Myranmar in 2006, he responding by saying: "That sounds like a pain in the ass-my favorite kind of travel story." And I think I can agree with him, which is one of the biggest reasons I love to read Paul T...
I read this because I had just helped organize a conference in Kowloon Tong, and spent 5 days visiting there and many of the other spots featured in the book. During our visit there, the final protesters from Occupy Central were arrested and carted off, which is something Theroux would have predi...
In the Washington Post Book World, Sven Birkerts called this exuberant novel "a complex and gripping work of invention and confession . . . I understood again how the prose of a true writer can bring us to a world beyond." The book spans almost thirty years in the life of a fictional "Paul Therou...
* not a non-fiction travel book, but still good, December 14, 2004 *This review is from: My Secret History-O.M. (Mass Market Paperback)I assumed this would be a travel book as so many of his titles are. It is, in a way, but it's fiction. I liked the book quite a lot, particularly the first chapte...
I could not put this book down, yet as I read the reason was not obvious. Beautifully written but a brilliant exercise in repetition. I became entranced. The book is hypnotic. At the end, the journey I had been on was not completely clear, as if I had emerged from an eon compressed in a 5 minute ...
World-famous photographer Maude Coffin Pratt has pointed her lens at the beautiful, obscure, and obscene, and at the private places and public parts of the famous, from Gertrude Stein to Graham Greene. When the seventy-year-old Maude rummages through her archives in preparation for a triumphant r...
Did not really enjoy. It had a good lead in and did a fair job of pulling me into the story but left me wanting after that. And not in a good way...Spoilers follow.Basically the gist of the book is that it's sometime in England, I don't remember if they specified the exact year. Irish bombs a...
My book is one I rescued from the local transfer station/dump trailer. A paperback with Ben Gazzara on the cover from 1979. I'm pretty sure I saw the movie but I don't remember much. This will be only my second Paul Theroux novel though I have read some great short stories from him, including a f...
Hood, a renegade American diplomat, envisions a new urban order through the opium fog of his room. His sometimes bedmate, Mayo, has stolen a Flemish painting and is negotiating for publicity with "The Times". Murf the bomb-maker leaves his mark in red whilst his girlfriend Brodie bombs Euston.
This is the book that began a sub-genre of travel writing, or so it seems. While there are many varieties of travel narratives, Paul Theroux in The Great Railway Bazaar takes the reader in a somewhat different direction, for this author's travel books are in many ways more self-reflective than th...
From this book and 'Sir Vidia's Shadow,' which I also recently finished, I can say that I very much trust Theroux as a reliable guide and observer, an insightful writer about people and place. I've read little of his fiction so far (only a few stories here and there, never a novel) but I liked t...
I have passively avoided Paul Theroux for years. Not for any reason, just that his books seemed like such an obvious choice. Also, I have always invented a false rivalry between Theroux and Bruce Chatwin, a similarly big-hit commercial travel writer who also wrote prolifically for magazines. I ha...
The Elephanta Suite is a collection of three novellas that feature Westerners out of their league in India. As an American living in India, I suspect anyone who’s had this experience will recognize instances in which—for good, bad, or a mix of each—one is swallowed whole by some feature of India ...
IT is said that travel broadens the horizons; but what to make of pounding the same paths again? In his latest book, American author Paul Theroux retraces the journey through Asia which he took back in 1973 and described in The Great Railway Bazaar (1975), the bestseller which established him as ...
This year's selection includes William Langewiesche's probing investigation in Vanity Fair of the slaughter of twenty-four Iraqis in Haditha; C. J. Chivers's chilling account in Esquire of the 2004 hostage crisis in Beslan, which killed 331 people, 186 of them children; Susan Casey's revelation i...
He looked one last time at my much-slashed and -amended essay on cowardice, which was already scheduled to be published. He said that it was finished, though I guessed that it still did not seem quite right to him. Move on to something new, he said; the new thing would be better for what I had le...
The place name transfixed him. "I like 'Christmas' so much! I think, There must be many nice things there." Imagining the bounty of a year-round, nonstop Yule-tide, Ambo signed a three-year contract and traveled hopefully to this magic-sounding place, 2,013 miles away. One morning, a few months a...
Mr. Gibbon shouted to Herbie over the roar of the machines. But Herbie did not hear. No one heard anyone else at Kant-Brake. That did not stop the employees from talking. It encouraged them. There were no disagreements, no arguments, no harsh words, and still everyone talked nearly all the time. ...
The name was misleading. They were huts, and chalet was mispronounced to suit them: “shally,” the English said, an appropriate word made out of shanty and alley. There were hundreds of them shoulder to shoulder along the Front. They had evolved from bathing machines, I guessed. The English were p...
The Branch Line to Barnstaple AMONG THE QUIET HILLS and meadows in the middle of Devon, this small train of three spruce coaches was the only moving object, and its harmless racket the only sound. It was one hour from end to end of the branch line, Exeter to Barnstaple, much of it along a stream ...
I had rehearsed it all mentally with such thoroughness that the whole business seemed inevitable. I had bought a ferry ticket from an agent in Ancona. The ferry was leaving from Bari, two-hundred-odd miles down the coast. I went by train to Bari. Returning to a city I always retraced my steps. In...
On an empty stretch of road outside of Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, out of the back seat of a four-wheel-drive Mitsubishi by a dozen or so men whose faces were swaddled in checkered scarves. Each one of them carried an AK-47. The truth of it dawned slowly on me, as the men seemed to rise up...
It was a Sunday. The dignity and somnolence of a Sunday, gone in most countries, was observed in Windhoek, and that made my arrival simpler. Among families in formal churchgoing clothes — men in suits, women in frilly dresses or long-sleeved robes, all smiling as though newly baptized — I walked ...
Now that I am sixty I can tell it. Years ago, when Taormina was a village most travelers avoided in the summer, because of the heat, I sought it out, to feel the heat. Heat was everything in the poem “Snake,” that D. H. Lawrence wrote in Taormina. Great names and associations also mattered to me,...
We were very friendly with a couple, Greg and June, and we spent a lot of time with them—maybe too much. Greg was always after me, calling me and slipping me notes. He said that June was frigid and so on. He was very hungry, and I had to admit I liked his attention. One day we ended up in bed, an...
UNGER. I had come to depend on seeing her once or twice a week for the sessions of tantric massage, and I had yearned for her while she'd been away—her week in Mirzapur. I was like an old-fashioned woman waiting for a man to call, passive, dependent, helpless. She said that tantra was all-encompa...