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• Interview With Paul Theroux: Invisible Man on a Ghost Train

Interview With Paul Theroux: Invisible Man on a Ghost Train

Do you think that since you wrote “The Great Railway Bazaar” the challenge for the travel writer has changed?

No, I think the challenge is what it’s always been, which is to make the reader see a place, experience a place, smell the place, hear the voices. It’s like the great challenge in fiction, which is to persuade the reader that he or she is there in the place and seeing it. It’s quite a big challenge, but that’s what it is. It’s to make the place palpable. You know when you’re reading something like that.

There’s a book that I loved, written in the ‘70s, called The Fearful Void by Geoffrey Moorhouse. He traveled across the Sahara on a camel with two Tuaregs, and it’s a thrilling story because he had such a terrible time. He didn’t succeed in crossing the Sahara. He only got halfway. But it’s a thrilling book. There’s always room for those books—someone attempting a difficult trip and then writing about it honestly and well.

The books I don’t have a lot of time for are the frivolous ones: lovable people in Tuscany, or a little treasure of a man in Spain, or wonderful meals. The books about having a great time. I’m not too interested in them. But there are plenty of them because people have the fantasy of ditching their job and going somewhere, saying, why don’t we go live in Italy, or Venezuela, or going to a Greek island, that used to be a big fantasy. These books with lots of sunshine and beaches, they have no interest for me. I did write a book about the Pacific that had a lot of sunshine and beaches, but they in were some dark places.

In that case—you’re referring to The Happy Isles of Oceania, of course—I recall that you wrote about your divorce, too, and that cast a shadow over your experience.

Yeah, I got divorced, and I found some of the people very hostile and territorial. No, I’ve never written about, “Wish you were here, having a great time.”

And you don’t seem to have a great interest in writing a travel book about Hawaii, where you spend part of every year.

It’s very hard to write about a place that you live in. I wrote a novel, Hotel Honolulu, and that’s about as far as I would go. I could write about Hawaii, but it’s a place I want to live in, and I’m still sort of learning about it.

That’s another thing about travel. You can go to a place and write about it, but the longer you live in a place the harder it is to write about. That’s why home is so difficult to write about.

You once wrote that “The challenge for the serious traveler in the age of globalization is to prove that the word ‘globalization’ is fairly meaningless.”

Oh yes. Where did I write that?

It was in the introduction to “The Best American Travel Writing” back in 2001. I liked that, because globalization is a phenomenon that every traveler confronts these days. We see KFCs and Starbucks everywhere. Can you talk about that, about proving that the word “globalization” is somewhat meaningless?

Well you know there’s a book by Thomas Friedman called The World is Flat, which says everything is accessible and people from Bangalore can come to New York and all that. I disagree, I think the world is round. It’s not only round, but it also has dark places. At the beginning of “Heart of Darkness,” Marlow says this has been one of the dark places of the earth, talking about England. England was once dark and neolithic. And then he talks about the Congo and how the Congo was a dark place. Well, the Congo is still a dark place.

A guy called Tim Butcher tried to retrace the footsteps of Stanley going through the Congo, and he couldn’t do it. He wrote a book, it’s called Blood River, I think it just came out, and he proved that the Congo is more difficult to travel in than at the time of Stanley, or he’s not the match of Stanley. Stanley took almost three years to go across the Congo. Butcher took six weeks or something.

You could say, how globalized is that? Well, not very globalized in my opinion. If you’re going to a place like the Congo, which is completely out of touch, it’s not connected, there’s no road, no government, just child soldiers or rebel soldiers ripping you off, that’s pretty tough. How flat is that world? There are places in Brazil, India. Name a country. China. Xinjiang in China. You can talk about how modern China is, and the Olympics and so forth. But eastern China: some of those people don’t consider themselves to be even Chinese. Well they’re not. They’re the Uyghur people, and they’re Muslims. They want to be in a country called East Turkestan. And they object to Chinese domination.

The world is only globalized to a small extant. People come to the United States, for example. They go to New York and say, Oh, I was in Paris yesterday and now I’m in New York, and it’s so much the same. Well, you have to say to those people, go to eastern Oklahoma, go to the Ozarks, go to North Dakota. Yes, New York may seem flat and globalized, but Fargo isn’t. Billings, Montana, isn’t. There are places that don’t have names, that are off the map. It’s presumptuous to assume that we’re all connected. There are people who have gotten nothing out of globalization. Their lives are only getting worse. They’re more neglected. But those are the places that are worth going to, I think.

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