August 18, 2008 Archives

Paul Theroux's Ghost Train to the Eastern Star is published by Houghton Mifflin.

Theroux has been writing travel books for 35 years, and for almost as long, reviewers have been slandering him (repetitively -- they hunt in packs) as "prickly," ornery, or otherwise disagreeable. I must be unusually tolerant. To me, Theroux seems a model of evenness, neither too crabby nor too tolerant. More to the point: Have these reviewers ever traveled? Long-term travel is misery and loneliness. It is trips in buses where children puke out the window, in filthy boats captained by drunk Albanians, in trains where porters warn you to keep your windows open, so thieves can't gas you as you sleep. It is grim hotel rooms with stained sheets. A little crabbiness is the only sane response.