Tag: Paul Theroux

Dark Star Safari

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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.

Ghost Train To the Eastern Star

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Theroux, Paul. Ghost Train To the Eastern Star: On the Tracks of the Greatest Railway Bazaar. Houghton Mifflen, 2008.

Reason read: July is Train Month.


Theroux first made this journey in 1973, thirty-three years earlier. He was eager to make comparisons as he followed the old travel itinerary of The Great Railway Bazaar (with a few exceptions like skirting Iran and Pakistan and being able to enter Cambodia as it was no longer controlled by the Khmer Rouge, for examples). [Confessional: I wanted to read these books backwards so that I could understand Theroux’s references. I guess you could say I wanted that 20/20 vision and I appreciated his admittance of half truths in The Great Railway Bazaar.]
Retracing his own steps affords Theroux the ability to look up hotels he previously visited and people he met thirty-three years ago. He is pleasantly surprised when they remember him and dismayed to learn others thought him a pompous jerk on his first visit.
In addition to writing about a journey, readers get a glimpse of Theroux’s personality. I found it curious that he doesn’t like people eating and walking at the same time (no street fairs for him). By 2006 he hasn’t wanted to learn the lesson of his first marriage – it is self-indulgent to travel for four months, leaving a wife and/or family behind. The family sees this extravagance as abandonment. (Although the second wife was wiser thanks to technology. She demanded Theroux take a smart phone.) My favorite part of Ghost Train was Theroux’s conversation with Haruki Murakami about his first marriage. It felt like an honest, soul-exposing confession. The real Theroux came out, author to author.
Theroux also gauges a country’s cultural acceptance by their use of pornography. Not sure why, because if you think about it, pornography is only tantalizing because it is often hidden from view. If sex was as commonplace as talking or breathing no one would be scandalized by it. Uncommon to the eye is scintillating. As the book goes on, Theroux’s running commentary on the varying sex trades increases. As an aside, I will have nightmares about the kun kraks.
In terms of idioms, I felt Theroux was overly negative in his descriptions of towns: acid, broken, beleaguered, cruel, crummy, crumbling, dirty, dim, dark, derelict, dreary, dilapidated, disorder, desperate, decaying, fatigued, foul, filthy, gloomy, lifeless, muddy, miserable, melancholy, mournful, nightmare, neglected, poisonous, primitive, pockmarked, rust-stained, ramshackle, ragged, smoky, sticky, shadowy, stale, stink, stinky, sooty, tough, threadbare, unfriendly, ugly, wrecked, wasteland to name a few. But, as another aside, I love authors who use the word hinterland. Don’t ask me why. I think it’s a very romantic word.

Confessional: sometimes when I am traveling by car or train (ground level), I will spot someone and imagine their life as mine. What would be like to be mowing the lawn when a speeding train rushes by? Fishing on the banks of a river when a car rattles over the bridge? Would I glance up and wonder about the passengers? Where are they going?

Second confessional: because I am somewhat obsessed with the music of Josh Ritter, I thought of his lyrics all about trains while reading Theroux’s book.

Lines I liked, “And sometimes you just need to clear out” (p 13). Amen. “Luxury is the enemy of observation” (p 63). Interesting. And one last one, “But just when I thought that this icebound city represented nothing more than a glacial point of departure, I was sitting in the hotel bar and the gods of travel delivered to me a horse’s ass” (p 461).

Author fact: Theroux’s list of fiction and nonfiction is impressive. I am reading ten of his works (but only completed Mosquito Coast and Ghost Train to the Eastern Star).

Book trivia: while there is an illustration of a map of Theroux’s journey, there are no photographs to speak of. Bummer.

Nancy said: Pearl mentioned Theroux is a connoisseur of long train rides.

Setlist: Stevie Wonder, Thelonious Monk’s “Espistrophy” and “Crespucule with Nellie”, Elvis, Mahler, and Tchaikovsky’s “Variations on a Rococo theme.”

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter called “Making Tracks By Train” (p 139).

Mosquito Coast

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Theroux, Paul. The Mosquito Coast. New York: Avon Books, 1982.

Reason read: June 21st is Father’s Day. Ahem.

Despite this being a book read in honor of Father’s Day, Charlie Fox’s dad isn’t the ideal father figure. He could fit into the role of Jack Torrance in Stephen King’s The Shining. Allie Fox, from the town of Hadley in Massachusetts, doesn’t trust the traditional school system, doesn’t trust the government, doesn’t trust his neighbors. He believes he can teach his children (Charlie, Jerry and the twins, Clover and April) all they need to know. He doesn’t suffer fools and constantly tests his children’s courage, especially eldest son Charlie’s. He is in constant competition with other men (“How many push ups can you do?”); he is proud, defiant, and must not, absolutely cannot, be embarrassed in front of his family. Fed up with his own country, Papa Fox is easily swayed by Honduran migrant workers to pack up his family and move to the Mosquito Coast. Once there, Theroux threads a growing sense of unease throughout the pages. The first whiff of danger comes with Father jokes about throwing Mr. Haddy overboard and it is possible to believe he is mad enough to have done it. Like Kings’s Jack Torrance, Allie Fox displays an escalating sense of craziness as time goes on. Paranoia grows like mold in the jungles of Honduras. It goes without saying that things don’t end well for the Fox family; or maybe they do if you like endings like The Shining.

As an aside, it is really strange to read about the area in which I currently call “home.” I try not to over analyze Theroux’s descriptions of Northampton or Hatfield or Springfield.

Lines or phrases I liked: First the phrases – “four-o’clock-in-the-morning courage,” and “creepy-quiet.”
Here are the lines I liked – “It was the town of dead ends” (p 108), “But what can you do with people who have already been corrupted?” (p 190), and last one, ” When a person is suffering and afraid, his ailments are obvious and his injuries stick out” (p 298).

Author fact: I think it is obvious Theroux spent some time in Massachusetts.

Book trivia: Woodcuts are by David Frampton. Another piece of trivia: Mosquito Coast was made into a movie in 1986.

Nancy said: Pearl didn’t say anything specific about Mosquito Coast other than explain the plot.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the obvious chapter called “Fathers and Sons” (p 85).

June Travels

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Of course I am not really traveling anywhere, but for the first time in a couple of months I have (finally) gotten back to reading. and. And! And, I did drive a car for the first time since 3/19/20. There’s that. In truth, I have been reading all along, just not with the pleasure and leisure I used to have. All of that is slowly coming back, in part due to the realization it’s okay to disappear into the pages from time to time. It is okay to read with no other agenda. I have started to think of the books as different forms of travel. Without further ado, here are the books for June:

Fiction:

  • The Second Summer of the Traveling Pants by Ann Brashares. Places I’ll go: Washington, D.C. & Alabama.
  • The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold. Places: Pennsylvania & something like heaven.
  • Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson. Places: around Sweden.
  • The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafron. Places: Barcelona, Spain and thensome.
  • Mosquito Coast by Paul Theroux. Places: My back yard of Western Massachusetts and Honduras.
  • Garden of the Gods by Gerald Durrell. Place: Cofu, Greece.

Nonfiction:

  • Perfection Salad by Laura Shapiro. Places: all around New England