The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas

Paul Theroux's book was published a year (1979) after Bruce Chatwin's book In Patagonia, and they were friends. The books are like night and day in difference. While Bruce Chatwin talks about Patagonia, he never explains how he got there, and his book has not one structured path in it. Paul Theroux, on the other hand, has a plan, and he loves travel, which for him means to GET TO another place, not BE IN another place. And I think he is right. True travel is the transportation phase, the active movement through places, not being dumped in a place and staying there.

The way Paul Theroux traveled to Patagonia is the focus, the structure, of the whole book. He gets on the subway and then commuter train in Boston in a snowstorm, and then show more takes local train after local train down to Mexico, through Central America, along the Andes, through long Argentina, and then eventually ends up on The Old Patagonian Express, the narrowgauge steam train that goes to Esquel. And then the book is over.

This book is not about Patagonia, this book is about human nature, nature and humans. Culture, politics, some natural history, pestering travel companions, good and bad hotel rooms, dusty old railroad cars, giant steaks in dining cars, delays, landslides, revolts, and rats chewing holes in the ceiling above your bed. It also has great interactions between Paul Theroux and the people he meets, from street urchins in Colombia to impossible Mr Thornberry in Costa Rica and the Argentinians need to be superior while having the right to complain about anything in their own country (and nobody else should).

It is a fantastic story, a meandering travel path through not only North and Latin American geography, but also classic literature (Paul Theroux discusses the books he reads during the trip), and it feels real and human. He is not trying to be some übermensch, not someone that stands above or besides his co-travelers or people he meets. He just is. Now I have to read his other travel books! Wow, what a read! Yes, A+ and five stars of course.

There are a lot of great passages in The Old Patagonian Express, and here is one that I think fits this review pretty well:

Reading alters the appearance of a book. Once it has been read, it never looks the same again, and people leave their individual imprint on a book they have read. One of the pleasures of reading is seeing this alternation on the pages, and the way, by reading it, you have made the book yours.

And now, The Old Patagonian Express is mine, forever. The physical book is still my husband's book, of course.

Read more: http://pondpond.blogspot.com/2013/02/book-reviews-patagonian-travels-one.html#ix...
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I enjoyed this thoroughly. I'd been warned in advance and was overall fine with the author's presence, taking the pieces of misanthropy and wryness that I liked and ignoring some other bits. Interesting to get a view of places a few decades before I saw them or know them, and some insight into politics of the time. More than that I think I enjoyed the story of train travel, the traveler's mind, or one traveler's, lords know there are a lot of types and all are misanthropic at some point, usually at a key level of discomfort. Overall amusing and thoughtful.

I've been finished with this book for over a month now and have been slowly ... very slowly ... writing down my thoughts on it. If you're a bottom line man, and I know at heart, you are :), Paul Theroux's The Old Patagonian Express is a good read. For what makes it worth a look, read on.

I started to read Paul Theroux's The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas (Mariner 1979) because I immediately liked his voice as a writer. Once into the book, I was charmed by Theroux's descriptions, by his occasional grumpiness, and by his rather sardonic wit, so I suggested the book to a couple of my friends. One friend read the first page of the introduction and finding Theroux pretentious, opted to put it back down again. I know show more the other friend at least started to read the book, but I haven't heard from her since, despite my having left a couple of messages for her, leading me to imagine that she'd either hopped a train herself or really hated Theroux and was no longer speaking to me (I've since learned that she's been in New York and Pittsburgh, which is a whole 'nother story).
As for the friend who put the book down, I've read reviews of Theroux that allude to a pretentious tone or attitude, but after completing The Old Patagonian Express and getting about half way through The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia, Theroux's work that preceded Patagonia by 4 years, I haven't found anything that I would interpret as overly-affected. At times the division between culture and/or language is obvious and Theroux sometimes becomes a kind of interpreter of the division, during which points, I suppose, he could be seen as committing the crime he describes in the introduction that made my friend put the book down. The objectionable bit was Theroux's dismissal of the way some travel narrators paint themselves as heroes of a "[q]uest … full of liberties." But then again, I couldn't say if there are liberties in Theroux's book—what I have found, primarily, is a writer who looks to the culture to inform and explain the landscape before him as well as someone who finds amusement in the absurd.
In one succinct passage, Theroux describes his border crossing from Guatemala to El Salvador: "The border was a shed. A boy in his sports shirt stamped my passport and demanded money. He asked me if I was carrying any drugs. I said no. What do I do now? I asked him. You go up the road, he said. There you will find another house. That is El Salvador" (127). It is while he is in El Salvador that Theroux goes to a football match between El Salvador and Mexico, during which he approaches his depiction of the match and its 45,000 spectators as " a model of Salvadorean society," complete with the acts of frustration and contempt committed at every level: national, social and individual. At another point, while in Bogatá, Theroux stops to purchase a poster, his choices ranging from posters of political figures whose visages seem to be a blend of Bolívar, Christ, and Che Guevara to posters of Hollywood movie stars to posters of cartoon characters. Theroux describes his choice as "the best of the bunch. It showed Christ on the cross, but he had managed to pull his hand away from one nail, and still hanging crucified but with his free arm around the shoulder of a praying guerrilla fighter, Christ was saying, 'I also was persecuted, my determined guerrilla'" (249).

By far, my favorite section of the book, in a book with many highly enjoyable sections, was Theroux's time in Buenes Aires during which he is summoned to meet and subsequently spends several days visiting with and reading to Jorge Luis Borges, who Theroux says has "the fussy precision of a chemist" (364). Through the narrative of his experiences, for me, Theroux delivers on what he says is his purpose in traveling and in writing about traveling: he delivers a book that gives pleasure; it is something to enjoy. show less

Perfect in its imperfection the book contained all three facets of travel writing, personal insight and experience, during the trip, cultural and historic descriptions of the areas passed through, and descriptions of the places and people he met. PT writes well and showed a good sense of place. He did get pissy and woe is me at times but that is travel. I enjoyed his meeting w Borges and his descriptions of New England.
Look forward to the next one.

In the end, I had to rush through this book in order to finish it before I left the hotel... which probably did it a disservice.
On the one hand, it was a fairly meandering read with not so much going on, and I certainly felt the peculiar boredom of travelling somewhere new, for the first time, and not even caring to look up from your book, which Paul Theroux captured well.
On the other hand, it never got above a "sto gap" read for me, hence 3 stars...

The weather is always too hot, too cold, or too rainy; the trains are all crowded, late, rackety, and uncomfortable. Theroux crankily endures plague-carrying rats, obnoxious fellow travellers, altitude sickness, flea-bag accomodations, political unrest and tedium, making this a terrific, schadenfreudish read from the comfort of your own home (but fairly off-putting if you are actually contemplating any kind of train journey or travel through Central or South America.)

Medford to tip of South America by train – great travel book

Beginning his journey in Boston, where he boarded the subway commuter train, and catching trains of all kinds on the way, Paul Theroux tells of his voyage from ice-bound Massachusetts and Illinois to the arid plateau of Argentina's most southerly tip. Sweating and shivering by turns as the temperature and altitude shoot up and down, thrown in with the appalling Mr. Thornberry in Limon and reading nightly to the blind writer, Borges, in Buenos Aires, Theroux vividly evokes the contrasts of a journey to the end of the line.