Theroux's Great Railway Bazaar

In the 1970's Paul Theroux spent four months on an out-and-back railway journey across Asia from London. Then he published a book about it. The Great Railway Bazaar was fantastic and of course now I want to take an epic train journey too.

Accompanying map from The Great Railway Bazaar (1975)

Theroux's humorous, beautiful descriptions and the characters he meets along the way held my attention across the continent. I empathized with his impatience towards certain passengers, although honestly sometimes he came across as an asshole. I learned that Sri Lanka used to be called Ceylon and that Gokteik Viaduct in Myanmar was built by Pennsylvania Steel in 1900. Theroux's travel fatigue by the end of the book was spot-on and hilarious. Major parts of the book are "so 70's" (hippies, Vietnam) and I'm looking forward to reading the companion sequel, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, where he retraces his itinerary in 2008.

The only thing that gave me a sour-lemon-face about this book was the Western white male perspective and barely disguised sense of superiority, not unlike another famous book about taking an exotic journey in order to write about it (ahem, Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert). For comparison and contrast, I submit The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen.

In an excellent Boston Review piece, Jessa Crispin argues that today's travel writer "sells not only lovely prose and insights into a new land but also the lifestyle of the rootless and adventurous ... If your life is an aspiration, you are a beacon, not a human, and you talk rather than listen." For women travel writers, "the focus of attention is the self" compared to the prototypical male writer who is an "expert witness who explains the native." See also this LA Review of Books piece regarding travel writing as memoir.  The issue with travel writing as memoir is the writer assumes they are "the most interesting person in the room." Crispin argues that rather than explain or self-reflect, the travel writer should first engage and listen by passing the metaphorical microphone.

If I were to lay Crispin's gender comparison out on some sort of travel writer scale, where one end is Elizabeth Gilbert and Cheryl Strayed (female, internal) and the other end is Paul Theroux and British colonialists (male, external), in the middle I would put Matthiessen. The Snow Leopard manages to be equal parts spiritual and physical journey; the reader sees the beauty of Tibetan mountains and the grief of Matthiessen. As an added bonus, the native characters exist beyond caricatures and are integral to the story; the microphone is partially passed.

Crispin's "lifestyle of the rootless and adventurous" is crystallized in the opening of Bazaar: "That [head]cold made leaving all the easier; leaving was a cure: 'Have you tried aspirin?' 'No, I think I'll got to India'" (p.15). Four months later and Theroux's final train ride through Russia is fraught with psychological travel fatigue, followed by missing a Christmas flight home: "Fiction is pure joy -- how sad that I could not reinvent the trip as fiction" (p. 379). I was about to argue that Theroux doesn't really present his story as aspirational, but then I recalled this quote: "All travel is circular ... the grand tour is just the inspired man's way of heading home" (p. 379). In conclusion, here is inspired man Paul Theroux's Instagram account.

Bottom line: Admire the scenery and the writing, give side-eye to the white Western male perspective, then book your own railroad odyssey ASAP.

"The railway bazaar, with its gadgets and passengers, represented the society so completely that to board it was to be challenged by the national character. At times it was like a leisurely seminar, but I also felt on some occasions that it was like being jailed and then assaulted by the monstrously typical." (p. 235)

also mentioned: The Mezzotint by M. R. James