This is supposed to be one of the most popular books in travel literature, so I began this book looking forward to a grand, unforgettable adventure with an equally grand, unforgettable traveller. It is an interesting read, of course, and we are treated to some awesome sceneries, colorful characters and snippets of history here and there, from London all the way to Asia and back through Russia. But Theroux is anything but grand and unforgettable here. He is cranky, irritable, and more than often, condescending to his fellow travellers -- you wonder why he bothered to take this long 4-month trip at all. I know how it feels to travel for days and for long distances, and especially when the trip is for work rather than holiday, at some point everything tries one's patience. But Theroux seemed to have more than the usual dose of impatience and ill-humor in the long-distance traveler here. Moreover, one feels that the book talks too much of dilapidated, filthy, noisy train stations, the either fine or very awful service in the trains' dining coaches, and the strange habits of his fellow passengers you begin to think how he could have been so unfortunate as to have all the oddballs thrown in his particular direction.

Overall, i found the book uneven, though i suppose, honest, as he never tried to wax poetic as perhaps most dreamy travellers are tempted to do when in far-off and strange lands. In moments of inspiration, however, his prose is beautiful, haunting even. But that does not happen often in the book, although I noticed that towards the end, he seemed to have more of those moments, perhaps in anticipation of home.

Though this book was less than what I expected, this hasn't turned me off Theroux. This book showed a lot of his moody, temperamental side, but it had some flashes of really wondrous prose as well. I'd like to think that his other books would have more of that wondrous prose, and less of the attitude. ( )

Recently reissued as a Penguin Modern Classic, "The Great Railway Bazaar" is Paul Theroux's 1975 account of a journey, mostly by train, from London to Tokyo and back.

Theroux confesses in the first sentence his attachment to the romantic notion of train travel, but the months spent on trains of all standards, from the battered, rattling local services of war torn southeast Asia to the superefficent Japanese bullet trains, almost destroy his fondness for train travel.

Theroux is from what could be called the realist school of travel writing - none of the impressionistic philosophizing of Bruce Chatwin or the broad humour of Pete McCarthy et al. here. In fact, he's perhaps understandably grumpy about many of the discomforts and inconveniences he endures, as well as misanthropic about many of the people he meets, particularly those he shares cabins with and bureaucratic train officials. I'd previously read his more recent "Dark Star Safari" and ascribed this tendency to his age, but the 30s Paul Theroux is just as cantankerous as the much older man. Son Louis's humour must be from his mother's side.

Theroux spends the odd page here and there musing on stopover points such as Istanbul but the book focusses on the journey. Since he doesn't seem to be enjoying himself much, the author makes a pretty difficult travelling companion to warm to, but on the other hand you admire him for his honesty about how gruelling his journey really is and the fact that hell can be other people. In addition, as all good travel writers must, he has an ability to transport the reader to a place in just a few words.

Apparently Theroux's next travel book is to be a retracing of this journey. Much of the territory has changed - no Middle Eastern theocracies in this book, but his passage as an American travelling in Vietnam might be a little easier now. On the basis of this book, fine though it is, one wonders why he wants to do this. ( )

Theroux's 1975 railroad travelogue in which he rides trains from London, through Europe, Asia, India, Southeast Asia, Japan, and back through the Soviet Union. It's terribly well written, but after a while, one tires of the details of his train compartment and dining car adventures. I picked it up because I wanted to read this summer's follow-up, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star.
[ full review ] ( )

Reading Theroux's travel literature, one wonders why he left home - the people he meets are almost universally irritating for him, and he takes little interest in much else except perhaps his own physical discomforts and prejudices. Of course we love to hate this type of splenetic and cantankerousness writing, not unlike Tobias Smollett's 1786 Travels Through France and Italy (Smollett also took a 'Grand Tour'). Theroux models himself an anti-tourist, resisting seeing the sites but when forced he rarely has anything positive to say. This appeals to the reader who wants to travel without being a tourist, but in the end comes across as crass and of little value. He is at his best describing the lowest encounters, prostitutes seem to fill the most interesting stories (it's unclear if he partakes but he does imbibe in smoking a fair amount of hashish). Theroux followed the "hippie trail" for part of the way but found them, like most everyone, open to ridicule.

There are some interesting historical curiosities. He traveled through Vietnam in late 1973 when the US military was pulling out, and so he got to see first-hand the deserted bases overtaken by squatters, stripped of every valuable not unlike what happened to Iraq in the wake of the US invasion in 2003, and perhaps not unlike what might happen again in the near future. He also makes a literary connection between the Vietnam War and Conrad's Heart of Darkness, well before the appearance of Apocalypse Now (1979). The best scene in the book I think is with the 3 Americans living on the beach with some Vietnamese women.

In the end this is an important book in the travel literature canon because Theroux set out to create something new and found a wide following of readers helping to revive interest in the genre, but he was eclipsed by writers like Bruce Chatwin (In Patagonia) who really did move the state of the art out of the 19th century into a modern aesthetic.

--Review by Stephen Balbach, via CoolReading (c) 2008 cc-by-nd ( )

Theroux is a bit stuffy and condescending--but I'll take that with his wit, adventure, and craziness ( )