A conversation with Paul Theroux about the ‘Eastern Star’
Perhaps the most popular words to describe Paul Theroux are “curmudgeonly” and “cranky,” but on Wednesday night at the Los Angeles Public Library, the inveterate traveler was in fine form.
His appearance, courtesy of the Library Foundation of Los Angeles in its marvelous Aloud public lecture series, organized by Louise Steinman, confirmed that the best travel writers are really journalists at heart, and Theroux’s sprawling and engrossing tome “Ghost Train to the Eastern Star” — the point of the evening’s discussion — proves what a terrific journalist and storyteller Theroux is.
Before a full house, Theroux had the somewhat difficult task of segueing from a live airing of the final presidential debate between John McCain and Barack Obama, but he handled it with appropriate wit and an occasionally thinly veiled aside on the current state of American politics.
But the book was the thing, and “Ghost Train,” his retracing of the trip he took in the early 1970s and recounted in “The Great Railway Bazaar,” provided him ample opportunity to share his insights into the “literature of revisitation” (think Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey”), to riff on a similar experience by Richard Henry Dana and to bestow upon all listeners something of the perspective that age grants the observant writer.
Asked about the fearlessness of his approach — sharing train compartments with soused strangers, enduring the hideous Turkmenistan-Uzbekistan border crossing, navigating the empty streets of Mandalay at 4 a.m. by rickshaw, reporting on the sex trade in Singapore — Theroux argued that the more harrowing the encounter, the better the story.
It is his skill in playing out that tension that makes the narrative of “Ghost Train” rip along.
“I have been a lucky traveler,” he confessed, whose good fortune has been well abetted by the kindness of strangers.
It is this kindness that softens the picture of the world that Theroux paints by the time he completes his journey, 28,000 miles later.
“Most of the world is worsening, shrinking to a ball of bungled destruction,” he writes. “Only the old can really see how gracelessly the world is aging and all that we have lost.”
Curmudgeonly? Not necessarily. Sobering? Given the evidence in “Ghost Train,” most definitely.
– Thomas Curwen, Los Angeles Times staff writer
(Thomas Curwen interviewed Paul Theroux for the Aloud series.)
[Photos: Paul Theroux, at his home in East Sandwich, Mass. ; Elise Amendola / Associated Press]
2 Comments on “A conversation with Paul Theroux about the ‘Eastern Star’”
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October 17th, 2008 at 8:06 am
Nice post, Thomas. Sorry I missed Theroux’s appearance.
I loved “Ghost Train.” Not only is Theroux as sharp as ever, but he can be very funny. My favorite phrase from the new book, used to describe a man he encountered during the trip: “fiercely mustached.”
December 23rd, 2008 at 6:51 am
As an avid reader of Theroux, I enjoyed “Ghost Train to the Eastern Star’ very much. His retracing the 1973 Great Railway Bazaar when I read him first, was superb. I liked very much his interviews of the famous authors from Parmuk, Clark, Murakami and Iyer were fabulous. Wonderful portraits of people and places. Theroux is a past master at it.
I enjoyed every page as someone who has been to the same places in a different mode and context. His reading of Japan is spot on as his commentary on India, Vietnam and Singapore.
I was saddened by what he said of Thai attitude to the people of the Indian sub-continent. Richly undeserved, I might add. I hope they’ll learn to change that attitude. Their future may well depend on it as a country sitting between China and the Indian sub-continent.