About book To The Ends Of The Earth: The Selected Travels (1994)
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 "Riding the Iron Rooster". He doesn't spend any time oohing and ahing over artistic or geographical splendors or waste much effort on wonderful food and architecture. Nor does he really try to capture a country and it society in depth, marshaling lots of background material. Instead, he does well being an "every man" in rendering an open look at what he experiences, without using his platform as narrator to force some wisdom or humorous diversion. His strength is in his well crafted vignettes of the strange and interesting people he met in his travels. These characters stick in the mind as representatives of the infinite variety in people and personality, almost independent of culture. There is some wry humor, often with himself as the butt of the tale. He unfortunately tends toward overgeneralizing certain people and runs the risk of negative stereotyping. For example, in his sketch of Mr. Chatterjee in Calcutta:He was a Bengali, and Bengalis were the most alert people I had met in India. They were also irritable, talkative, dogmatic, arrogant, and humorless, holding forth with malicious skill on virtually every subject except the future of Calcutta.And in Guatemala City, he propounds:The Guatemalans, sullen at the best of times, display a scolded resignation--bordering at times on guiltiness--when the subject of earthqukes is raised. Yet he does reflect on the vagaries of casual characterization of a people when he beholds the worldly city of Buenos Aires: In the immigrant free-for-all in Buenos Aires, in which a full third of Argentina's population lives, I looked in vain for what I considered to be seizable South American characteristics. I had become used to the burial ground features of ruined cities, the beggrs' culture, the hacienda economy, and complacent and well- heeled families disenranchising Indians, government by nepotism, the pig on the railway platform. The primary colors of such crudities had made my eye unsuble and had spoiled my sense of discrimination.I most enjoyed the respite from travel in the home of Borges, blind and nearly 80. His mind is electric, bouncing from subject to subject, and very strong in his likes and dislikes in literature and societies (e.g. he favors the English and Spanish and disparages Mexicans and Canadians). He has Theroux read to him from Kipling and Poe. Theroux asks him: "Do you ever reread your own work?" "Never, I am not happy with my work. The critics have greatly exaggered its importance. I would rather read"--he lunged at his bookshelves and made a gathering motion with his hands--"real writers. Ha!"In the end, I wasn't enthalled, only moderately satisfied. I got spoiled by Bryson's "In a Sunburned Country": chock full of enlightening facts, uplifting experiences with people, and outrageously funny to boot. To be fair, Theroux doesn't really intend to render something deep or entertaining about the societies he passes through, but is using the stimulus of novel experiences while disconneted from his mundane life to construct reflective essays.
I enjoy Paul Theroux's travel books so I tend to pick up any that I haven't read when I come across them. When I pulled this out of the stack while packing to move I expected it to be a single cohesive journey rather than a series of excerpts from several of his books. I enjoyed it, especially seeing as it is broken up into little bites so I could read just a little bit here and there. The first book of his that I read was Riding the Iron Rooster and it turned me on to travel narratives in general because I liked it so much. It was nice to find some excerpts in here, in part because it had been long enough since I read the book that they were only vaguely familiar and still fresh. I may have to wait a few months before picking up another of his books off the stack, since the remainder on Mt. TBR are excerpted in this book.
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If you are a fan of travel writings and use libraries, you are stuck with Theroux. I have read the books, mostly years ago, from which these exerts are taken, found them cheerless then and cheerless now. He presents interesting information about places he travels but never gives much indication of enjoying those travels. I always feel dissatisfied after reading his books-- was it really all that bad? Still I seem to be running out of possibilities on the 800 and900 shelves of my local library. Sigh.
—Carol Wakefield
Haven't read this one though I have read many. I am usually a huge fan of all things Theroux - fiction or travel. I see below this is a compendium of excerpts from some books I've already read.
—Lynn Pribus
This is a book I have had for several years and started a couple times but this time I plowed through it and reading 90% of it, some parts I missed. The chapters in this book are taken out of other travel books by Theroux. Many of the travels are on trains in various parts of the world. The one thing I do like about his writings is the emphasis he puts on the characters he meets in his travels rather than the places in and of themselves. He traveled to places I wouldn’t have had a desire to see, at least not yet. Remote villages in India, or Ethiopia, or somewhere in the Congo. Many of the people he sees are the pathetic, unfortunate ones, that he views with compassion. Would I recommend the book? I am not sure. It is a bit dry and slow reading, written with a British sense of humor.
—Richard
