Friday Fiction: Paul Theroux

--by Hanje Richards
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Paul Edward Theroux (born April 10, 1941) is an American travel writer and novelist whose best known work is, perhaps, The Great Railway Bazaar (1975), a travelogue about a trip he made by train from the United Kingdom through Western and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, through South Asia, then South-East Asia, up through East Asia, as far east as Japan, and then back across Russia to his point of origin. Although perhaps best known as a travel writer, Theroux has also published numerous works of fiction.
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I have included both fiction and non-fiction books in this list and have noted the non-fiction titles at the end of the annotation.
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Blinding Light - Slade Steadman's lone opus, published twenty years ago, was Trespassing, a cult classic about his travels through dozens of countries without benefit of passport. With his soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend Ava in tow, Steadman sets out for Ecuador’s jungle in search of a rare hallucinogenic drug and the cure for his writer’s block. Amid a gang of thrill-seeking tourists, he finds his drug and his inspiration but is beset with an unnerving side effect – periodic blindness. His world is altered profoundly: Ava stays by his side, he writes an erotic, autobiographical novel with the drug serving as muse, and he returns to stardom.
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Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town - A rich and insightful book whose itinerary is Africa, from Cairo to Cape Town: down the Nile, through Sudan and Ethiopia, to Kenya, Uganda, and ultimately to the tip of South Africa. Going by train, dugout canoe, "chicken bus," and cattle truck, Theroux passes through some of the most beautiful – and often life-threatening – landscapes on earth. (nonfiction)
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Elephanta Suite - Three intertwined novellas of Westerners transformed by their sojourns in India. This book captures the tumult, ambition, hardship, and serenity that mark today’s India. Theroux’s Westerners risk venturing far beyond the subcontinent’s well-worn paths. A middle-aged couple on vacation veers heedlessly from idyll to chaos. A buttoned-up Boston lawyer finds succor in Mumbai’s reeking slums. And a young woman befriends an elephant in Bangalore.
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We also meet Indian characters as singular as they are reflective of the country’s subtle ironies: an executive who yearns to become a holy beggar, an earnest young striver whose personality is rewired by acquiring an American accent, a miracle-working guru, and others.
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Family Arsenal - Hood, a renegade American diplomat, envisions a new urban order through the opium fog of his room. His sometimes bedmate, Mayo, has stolen a Flemish painting and is negotiating for publicity with "The Times". Murf the bomb-maker leaves his mark in red whilst his girlfriend Brodie bombs Euston.
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Fresh Air Fiend: Travel Writings, 1985-2000 - Paul Theroux's first collection of essays and articles devoted entirely to travel writing. He touches down on five continents and floats through most seas in between to deliver a literary adventure of the first order. From the crisp quiet of a solitary week spent in the snowbound Maine woods to the expectant chaos of Hong Kong on the eve of the Hand-over, Theroux demonstrates how the traveling life and the writing life are intimately connected. His journeys in remote hinterlands and crowded foreign capitals provide the necessary perspective to "become a stranger" in order to discover the self. (nonfiction)
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Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: On the Tracks of the Great Railway Bazaar - Three decades after The Great Railway Bazaar, Theroux re-creates that earlier journey. His odyssey takes him from Eastern Europe, still hung-over from communism, through tense but thriving Turkey into the Caucasus, where Georgia limps back toward feudalism while its neighbor Azerbaijan revels in oil-fueled capitalism. Theroux is firsthand witness to it all, encountering adventures only he could have: from the literary (sparring with the incisive Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk) to the dissolute (surviving a week-long bender on the Trans-Siberian Railroad).Wherever he goes, his omnivorous curiosity and unerring eye for detail never fail to inspire, enlighten, inform, and entertain. (nonfiction)
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Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia - First published more than thirty years ago, Paul Theroux's strange, unique, and hugely entertaining railway odyssey has become a modern classic of travel literature. Here Theroux recounts his early adventures on an unusual grand continental tour. Asia's fabled trains – the Orient Express, the Khyber Pass Local, the Frontier Mail, the Golden Arrow to Kuala Lumpur, the Mandalay Express, the Trans-Siberian Express – are the stars of a journey that takes him on a loop eastbound from London's Victoria Station to Tokyo Central, then back from Japan on the Trans-Siberian. (nonfiction)
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Hotel Honolulu - The novel's narrator, a down-on-his-luck writer, escapes to Waikiki and soon finds himself the manager of the Hotel Honolulu, a low-rent establishment a few blocks off the beach. Honeymooners, vacationers, wanderers, mythomaniacs, soldiers, and families all check in to the hotel. Like the Canterbury pilgrims, every guest has come in search of something – sun, love, happiness, objects of unnameable longing – and everyone has a story. By turns hilarious, ribald, tender, and tragic, Hotel Honolulu offers a unique glimpse of the psychological landscape of an American paradise.
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Jungle Lovers - This story takes place in Malawi, a tiny Central African republic caught between dictator and agitator. Here are tested the ideals of two men, an American fired with zeal to dispense life insurance to Africans and a messianic white revolutionary whose specialty is bombs. When Calvin Mullet of Homemakers’ Mutual is taken prisoner by the ruthless Marais and attempts to sell him a policy, their lives become strangely and irrevocably linked.
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Kingdom by the Sea: A Journey Around Great Britain - It was 1982, the summer of the Falkland Islands War, and the birth of the royal heir, Prince William – and the ideal time, Theroux found, to surprise the British into talking about themselves. The result is a candid, funny, perceptive, and opinionated travelogue of his journey and his findings. (nonfiction)
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Millroy the Magician - Fourteen-year-old Jilly Farina was enthralled with Millroy, the Magician at the Barnstable County Fair. After all, he once turned a girl from the audience into a glass of milk and drank her! But when Jilly stepped into the wickerwork coffin during a performance, she had no idea he would transform her dreary life into something truly magical, and a touch bizarre.
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For Millroy was no ordinary magician. He could smell the future, and Jilly was going to be part of it. Yet not even Millroy could foresee how far determination and a dream could take him, as he and his new young assistant hit the road – and the airwaves – to save America's unhealthy appetite and floundering soul.

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Mosquito Coast - The paranoid and brilliant inventor Allie Fox takes his family to live in the Honduran jungle, determined to build a civilization better than the one they've left. Fleeing from an America he sees as mired in materialism and conformity, he hopes to rediscover a purer life. But his utopian experiment takes a dark turn when his obsessions lead the family toward unimaginable danger.

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My Other Life - The book spans almost thirty years in the life of a fictional "Paul Theroux," who moves through young bachelorhood in Africa, in and out of marriage, affairs, and employment, and between continents. It's a wry, worldly, erotic, and deeply moving account of one man's first half century.

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My Secret History - The story of Andre Parent, a writer, a world traveler, a lover of every kind of woman he chances to meet in a life as varied as a man can lead.
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It begins with his days as a Massachusetts altar boy, when his first furtive sexual encounter introduces him to the thrills of leading a double life. As a teenaged lifeguard, Andre finds himself caught between the attentions of a beautiful young student and an amorous older woman. Soon he is in Africa, where the local women are numerous, easy, and free. And as the boy becomes a man, he turns his attention to writing, which brings him fame, and a wife, who may finally cause him to know himself. But not before he sets up his most dangerous secret life, one that any man might envy, but that could cost Andre Parent the delicate balance that makes him who he is.
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O-Zone - Welcome to the America of the 21st century. The O-Zone is a forbidding land of nuclear waste, mutants & aliens – except for one place that is a beautiful oasis amidst the destruction. When two aliens who look suspiciously human are shot, Hooper Allbright, disurbed by the memories of those he once loved, goes back down into the O-Zone to try to reach the people he lost, though they may be unreachable by now.
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Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas - Starting with a rush-hour subway ride to South Station in Boston to catch the Lake Shore Limited to Chicago, Theroux winds up on the poky, wandering Old Patagonian Express steam engine, which comes to a halt in a desolate land of cracked hills and thorn bushes. But with Theroux the view along the way is what matters: the monologuing Mr. Thornberry in Costa Rica, the bogus priest of Cali, and the blind Jorge Luis Borges, who delights in having Theroux read Robert Louis Stevenson to him. (nonfiction)
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Pillars of Hercules: A Grand Tour of the Mediterranean - Theroux spent a year and a half traveling the shores of the Mediterranean, from Calpe (the Rock of Gibraltar) to Abila (Jebel Musa in Morocco), the twin pillars of Hercules. He insists there is a difference between the acquisitive, entertainment-seeking tourist and the traveler. In Gibraltar, he quotes the Spanish writer, Pio Baroja, "Parece que busco algo; pero no busco nada" [“It may look as if I am seeking something; but I am seeking nothing”]. Traveling with Theroux is almost pure adventure because he covets his experiences and guards against commitments that could taint them. (nonfiction)
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Riding the Iron Rooster: By Train Through China – is Theroux’s account of his epic journey through China. He hops aboard as part of a tour group in London and sets out for China's border. He then spends a year traversing the country, where he pieces together a fascinating snapshot of a unique moment in history. From the barren deserts of Xinjiang to the ice forests of Manchuria, from the dense metropolises of Shanghai, Beijing, and Canton to the dry hills of Tibet, Theroux offers an unforgettable portrait of a magnificent land and an extraordinary people. (nonfiction)
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Sir Vidia’s Shadow: A Friendship Across Five Continents - This heartfelt and revealing account of Paul Theroux's thirty-year friendship with the legendary V. S. Naipaul is an intimate record of a literary mentorship that traces the growth of both writers' careers and explores the unique effect each had on the other. Built around exotic landscapes, anecdotes that are revealing, humorous, and melancholy, and three decades of mutual history, this is a personal account of how one develops as a writer and how a friendship waxes and wanes between two men who have set themselves on the perilous journey of a writing life. (biography)
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Stranger at the Palazzo d’Oro and Other Stories - The sensual story of an unusual love affair leads the collection. The thrill and risk of pursuit and conquest mark the accompanying stories, which tell of the sexual awakening and rites of passage of a Boston boyhood, the ruin of a writer in Africa, and the bewitchment of a retiree in Hawaii. Filled with Theroux's typically exquisite yet devastating descriptions of people and places.