Theroux, Paul. Dark Star Safari. Houghton Mifflin, 2003.
Reason read: Theroux was born in the month of April. Read in his honor.
Paul Theroux likes putting himself in dangerous situations. Traveling across Africa in overcrowded busses and taxis, under the constant threat of flat tires, engine troubles, heat exhaustion and bandits is only part of the journey. Rubbing elbows with tourists and natives alike; the insistent begging for money follows him everywhere (as an aside, Kira Salak encountered excessive pleas for money along the River Niger in her memoir The Cruelest Journey). Yet, despite it all, Theroux begrudgingly admits he enjoys traversing the African continent. He is patient of delays but intolerant of filth.
Here’s the thing about Theroux’s prejudices. Everyone gossips. Everyone speaks poorly of a stranger for one reason or another. We all do it at one time or another. Theroux just happened to put his colorful and not so politically correct musings in a book. Knowing the context, I think I would like hanging out with Paul Theroux especially on cruise ships and in swanky hotels. His snarky comments about the fellow passengers and wandering tourists are unveiled observations about visitors as a comfortable, indulgent society. He makes no apology for his disdain. What was more difficult to stomach was his harsh opinions of the natives and relief workers, especially when referred to an an old man. Theroux is definitely not a people person and that made reading Dark Star Safari more of a slog.
If I can end on a positive note: I love it when literature brings familiarity to a foreign place even if you have never been there before. It is as if Dark Star Safari provided me with an unintentional guidebook for travel to a place I will never see with my own eyes.
Favorite quote defending the aging process, “Years are not an affliction” (p 198).
Other line I liked, “…nothing is more revealing of a person’s mind than a person’s anger” (p 25). So true.
As an aside, this is the third book that has a section on female circumcision or infant clitoridectomy.
Confessional: I read the section about Malawi with great care because of a Malawi penpal I had in high school. He died in an automobile accident.
Author fact: Theroux was once a Peace Corps volunteer. I am sure it was during this time that he developed a disdain for the privileged and misinformed tourists he met in his journeys.
Book trivia: several times throughout Dark Star Safari Theroux described the landscape as otherworldly, of another planet like a “dark star.”
Music: Bob Marley, Enya, Tracy Chapman, Jim Reeves, Hank Williams, Flatts and Scruggs, Thomas Mapfumo’s “Hondo,” “Fascinatin’ Rhythm,”
BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “Africa: the Greenest Continent” (p 7) and again in “Brazil” (p 44). Brazil has nothing to do with Dark Star Safari.
~*LunaSea*~ 