Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Writer Reflects on His Life and Humanity by Revisting His Past, 4 Oct 2008
If you want a book about how to travel by train, skip this one.
If you want a book about what you'll discover about yourself if you revisit old haunts, you may find this book intriguing enough to propel you back to your former hangouts and to review your memories . . . both painful and pleasant.
If you enjoy literary pilgrimages, you'll enjoy several entertaining moments.
If you want keen insights into nations you haven't visited, you won't find enough to warrant reading the book.
If you want a book of great writing, you will probably be disappointed. Mr. Theroux will wow you now and then with brilliant passages . . . particularly in the beginning and end . . . but mostly it's plain vanilla writing.
Why then did I like the book a lot? Mr. Theroux reminded me of a fresh way to look at the world, a way that I used to employ quite often.
Let me explain. When I was growing up, my father worked for the Santa Fe Railway and our family had a pass for free travel from California to Illinois. Most of our long trips were by train. In college, I also traveled across the United States several times to save a few pennies. During those trips, I grew to appreciate places that you never see from an airplane or an interstate highway. Railway travel allowed me to meet many memorable people and to have experiences I otherwise wouldn't have had.
Writers live solitary lives, often more so when they are in a crowd. Railway travel is a buffer between the writer and the world that allows the writer to venture out amongst everyone in a comfortable way. I realized that leaving the writer's cocoon more often is good for the writer and the writer's readers.
Mr. Theroux is generous in sharing his observations during his much earlier trip along a similar route, as well as his feelings as his marriage fell apart. Those perspectives make the observations much more powerful and interesting. He is most comfortable talking about places and times in terms of other authors and conversing with authors. I found those interludes to be particularly intriguing.
Although I didn't learn enough to make me want to organize a particular kind of trip to any of these places, I did gain a sense of how a writer might react to each of the locales. From those observations, I think I know which of these places I would like to visit and which ones not. That aspect was a pleasant surprise.
I was fascinated by the differences in national character demonstrated among the ordinary people he met, most moving in his description of the forgiveness of the Vietnamese people towards ordinary Americans. As he traveled around, people in one country would be happy and enjoying life, while in the next country misery existed regardless of material comforts. As a result, I read the book very slowly. I needed time to digest what he said about each country before I could go on to the next one. To me, that's a sign of good writing: He made me think a lot.
Like many travelers, Mr. Theroux likes to report on some things more than others. I wasn't quite sure why he gives such an encyclopedic description about the sex trade in each nation, but perhaps as a man traveling alone that stood out more than the helpfulness of ordinary people. I could have done with less of that element. I also didn't enjoy his angry dismissal of anyone who is a missionary. What is that all about?
I was especially intrigued to realize that you can get to know people better during a train trip than during other casual contacts in travel. I plan to take advantage of that during my future trips.
All aboard for more understanding!
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
An intelligently written set of cliches, 28 Sep 2008
Reading 'Ghost Train to the Eastern Star' is to be transported immediately into the presence of a master of his craft. Perhaps one of the greatest travel writers alive, Paul Theroux revisits the journey he took through Europe and Asia 33 years ago, musing along the way on how both he, and the countries he travels through, have altered over the years.
But where his writing is undeniably engaging, especially when he relates his talks with fellow authors he meets along the way, the conclusions he draws never ascend from the mire of cliches in which he seems to wallow. Thus India is uniformly hot, oppressive and overpopulated, Thailand is a land of beautiful women and the sex industry, Japan is a living embodiment of manga cartoons, and Russia is replete with hardened alcoholics. Much of his ire is reserved for Singapore, whose citizens are described as being homogenously rude and brash - could this perhaps be because Theroux, who used to lecture there, left the country on a bad note?
To his credit, Theroux acknowledges at the beginning that a travel writer, passing through a place for only a few days, can never aspire to anything other than generalizations. It seems a pity, then, that in his generalizations Theroux seems unwilling to look beyond the stereotypes or to challenge the assumptions so often made by tourists from abroad. One almost wonders if he actively went looking for the cliches, so trite are some of his images.
This, then, is where the book must rest; a travel book not so much about the places themselves, but about the author, a journey not so much of physical distance and travel, but of temporal distance and a philosophical quest. In this, it does not disappoint.
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10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A master at the height of his powers, 20 Sep 2008
Ever since I accidentally came across his work as a teenager in the mid-1990s, picking up a copy of his novel `My Other Life' at a book sale and being immediately drawn to its ambition and clarity of prose, Paul Theroux has been a hero of mine. His work has been an inspiration as I made my own way as an author and journalist, simultaneously delighting and depressing me - the former because he is so good, the latter because I doubt I will ever match his talent. Like a literary groupie I have read his every word, looking forward to each new release.
While his novels are always enjoyable - and some, such as `The Mosquito Coast' and `Milroy The Magician' can be described modern classics - I believe it is the narrative non-fiction and travel writing that is the strongest in his long portfolio, the sort of work that maybe bestows greatness upon him as a writer. He is entertaining, incisive, funny; and writes with beautiful clarity, seemingly incapable of putting a dull word on the page. While I sometimes disagree with his portrayal of places I have myself visited, he always seems to capture the essence of a place in a certain time.
Theroux's widely acknowledged travel classic is `The Great Railway Bazaar' his 1973 journey from London, through Europe and Asia and back again. It is a sort of journey without purpose or aim, a meditation on the wonders of rail. It is darkly funny, and tells of a world that no longer exists: Soviet Eastern Europe; Shahist Iran; an Afghanistan that is still on the hippy trail; war-riddled Vietnam; Communist Russia. So much has changed since then that it seemed inevitable that Theroux would eventually go back, and that he has done in `Ghost Train to the Eastern Star.'
I found it instructive and entertaining to re-read his 1970s classic with the new volume to see for myself how the world had changed, but also how Theroux had evolved as a writer (less funny, more contemplative, less likely to jump to the hasty conclusions he criticises other writers for; still a charming, erudite and likeable guide).
At 66 he is twice as old as when he embarked on The Great Railway Bazaar. The World has changed: He was refused a visa for Iran, told Afghanistan was too dangerous to visit; but he can stop en route in former-Soviet Republics, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan; visit North Vietnam; stop off on the Trans-Siberian route at Perm.
As a reader these places seem less foreign or strange even than they did when I first read The Great Railway Bazaar in the 1990s. While his accounts are, perhaps, less revelatory he is still perceptive and entertaining. He delights in seeing countries `with their pants down' and seeks out red light districts, sex shops, dodgy bars and other dives. An encounter with a Ukrainian prostitute in Turkey is particularly heart-breaking in its sadness.
Occasionally he interviews or meets up with other celebrated authors: Orhan Pamuk in Turkey, Haruki Murakami in Tokyo and the late Arthur C Clarke in Sri Lanka, the latter wearing a T-shirt saying, `I invented the satellite and all I got was this lousy T-shirt'. These add colour to his travels, but as pieces of journalism tacked on to the narrative they are marvelous and seem to transcend the ordinary literary interview. Perhaps this is because he finds his subjects in their natural arena.
The Great Railway Bazaar is referred back to regularly. Theroux fills in some of the blank spaces of that trip: he was terribly home sick and aware of his wife having an extra-marital affair whilst he conducted that first trip, but this was ignored (for obvious reasons) in the first book (save for a dream he has on the Trans Siberian Express that hints at his wife's unhappiness and perhaps her vindictiveness too). At the same time, I felt by reading the two books concurrently I learnt more than he told me.
Which brings me on to my principle niggle with Theroux, which is the sense, sometimes, that he isn't always being straight with the reader, that he is somehow playing games. He admits that a passage in The Great Railway Bazaar, where he met an aged hotel manager on a train, was largely fabricated (he transplanted the conversation to a train carriage to add to its dramatic appeal, he said) and you wonder where else he has been economical with the truth. Why is his second wife, Sheila Donnelly, referred to as Penelope? Is she really at home (in Hawaii) knitting? His first wife Anne is referenced often, but I don't think in any of his work he's ever mentioned his sons as adults, the novelist Marcel Theroux, and TV documentary maker and goofball, Louis. I think there's a side to Theroux which we will never see, unless his first wife - as has often been rumored - brings out her memoir of life with the writer.
But all this is digression. Ghost Train to The Eastern Star is a wonderful travel book - lyrical, funny, meditative - and the best I've read in years. Possibly it is Theroux's greatest work. But don't read it on its own, though; read it with The Great Railway Bazaar, chapter by chapter and appreciate how the world, and Paul Theroux, have changed.
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