Globe-Tripping Again With a Vagabond Scribbler

By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER writing in the New York Times overnight:
Published: August 21, 2008

Like any conscientious traveler, Paul Theroux begins his latest voyage with a thorough round of inoculations. Travel, he’s well aware, is “an elaborate bumming evasion, allowing us to call attention to ourselves with our conspicuous absence while we intrude upon other people’s privacy.” Travel writing is “a license to bore,” “the lowest form of literary self-indulgence.” Yes, yes, he knows: “It’s much harder to stay at home and be polite to people and face things, but where’s the book in that? Better the boastful charade of pretending to be an adventurer.”

GHOST TRAIN TO THE EASTERN STAR
On the Tracks of the Great Railway Bazaar
By Paul Theroux
496 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $28. (NZ Hamish Hamilton $37)

Besides, what is a professional vagabond to do? More than three decades ago, Mr. Theroux helped kick off the boom in modern travel writing with “The Great Railway Bazaar,” his rollicking and hugely successful account of a 25,000-mile overland journey through Asia. Since then, it seems, even the diviest parts of the world have filled up with backpackers and “opportunistic punks” trying to get a piece of the literary action. But retracing one’s own youthful steps, as he does in “Ghost Train to the Eastern Star,” is still, he assures us, quite original.

For the full NYT review link here.

Mentioned previously on this blog.