Paul Theroux: ‘The Travel Book Was a Bore’
Travel Blog • Jim Benning • 03.24.08 | 11:24 AM ET
We recently noted that Paul Theroux’s next book, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, due out in September, retraces the journey he chronicled in 1975’s The Great Railway Bazaar. Perhaps that’s why he’s now reflecting on his motivations behind the original journey, and his feelings about travel writing at the time. Whatever the reason, fans of “The Great Railway Bazaar” should enjoy this essay in the Guardian.
Writes Theroux:
The travel book was a bore. It annoyed me that a traveller hid his or her moments of desperation or fear or lust. Or the time he or she screamed at the taxi driver, or mocked the folk dancers. And what did they eat, what books did they read to kill time, and what were the toilets like? I had done enough travelling to know that half of travel was delay or nuisance - buses breaking down, hotel clerks being rude, market peddlers being rapacious. The truth of travel was interesting and off-key, and few people ever wrote about it.
Theroux, of course, went on to write about all of those things, which is why so many travelers love that book, and its cranky author, so much.
Related on World Hum:
* Former Punk Paul Theroux in India
* No. 3: ‘The Great Railway Bazaar’ by Paul Theroux
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Jim Benning is the editor and co-founder of World Hum.
dwight tanner 03.31.08 | 6:45 PM ET
Theroux did breath new life into the travel book, making himself the primary character in a picaresque adventure tale. The books were of a different time and place. His world was much more exotic, because many more places were forbidden, inaccessible and unknown to most of us. He gave us the vicarious pleasure of reading about places that we thought we would never visit. Theroux’s best travel writin, like Le carre’s best novels, were written prior to the end of the cold war when some places and cultures were forbidden to most of us.