The Great Railway Bazaar

He was 31 and married with two small children, living in a small house in London. He had no "job" as such but he had multiple narrative and pedagogical skills. He was French Canadian, a native of New England, a product of its best Universities. He had been a teacher of English with the Peace Corps in Malawi and Uganda for four years and, with other sponsors. for two years in Singapore. He was now (in 1972) a "writer" of sorts and had always loved trains. So in the late summer of that year he set out to cross Asia and back by train - alone.

After four months "on the road" - mainly by rail - he returned, rejoined his family and two years later published his first travel book -The Great Railway Bazaar. It was an instant success; and in the ensuing 40 odd years Paul Theroux novelist, teacher, man of letters and social critic has not only become the dean of travel writers with more than 10 books on travel to his credit but an established novelist, essayist and short story writer as well a published author of more than 35 books of non-travel books in his name.

I read Bazaar when it was first published and became a Theroux fan on the spot; and since then I have read and cheered every one of its "issue"; but I have never written any comments on Bazaar. However, having just finished his last and perhaps his final travel book (The Last Train From Zona Verde,) I think it's time to say something about Bazaar which I have read again for this purpose.

Bazaar starts from London in 1972 with a rail trip to Paris where Theroux boards the "Direct-Orient-Express" which is not to be confused with Agatha Christy's or Alfred Hitchcock's luxury train. There's only one sleeping car for Istanbul via Milan, Venice and Belgrade. And you wouldn't want any of your family to have to travel on it. There's no dining car. You are pretty much on your own for a couple of days, But Istanbul is, as always, engaging. Then it's the "Express" across Turkey to the border of Iran, another "Express" to Teheran, a flight to Peshawar and then the Khyber Pass Local and the Frontier Mail to Mumbai (then Bombay), Indian trains of the mid 1970s too numerous to mention here - Bombay, Simla, New Delhi, Calcutta. A train to Ceylon (before it was Sri Lanka). A flight to Burma (when it was still Burma). Then The Mandalay express. Up country through Vietnam (where the war was still winding down) . A flight to Japan. Tokyo. Kyoto. The fast Japanese trains. And then - by contrast - a voyage ("storm tossed" is the proper phrase for it) to the Eastern Terminus of the Trans Siberian "Express" in the USSR and ten days across Siberia in late December. (Can you imagine ten days on a train in a small compartment with another occupant and never a bath? You really have to love trains!) And, finally, three days after Christmas he's home

It was a time when travel in most of the countries he visited was for the hardy and adventurous. There was no internet, no GPS,
no email, no iPhone. You used the telegraph system such as it was to communicate with home. Credit cards were generally a thing of the future so you carried your money in a money belt and used bank drafts (when available) for your cash. The modern preventatives or analgesics for Delhi Belly, its children and cousins, were in the future. And personal cleanliness while traveling was obviously a luxury if it could be accommodated at all.

Curiously Theroux has never to my memory commented on any of these things. Yes, I have read in some of his books where he has been ill, but we never read of the ordinary vicissitudes of travel -- problems which the rest of us have when we just go to New York. Nor do we nor have we read about his travel plans. Is it all catch-as-catch-can? What was the preparation for the trip? (Obviously there was and had been some preparation because he frequently writes about giving lectures or teaching, and there needs to be some advance work for this.) And where does he find all the books he talks about reading as he goes? They're great books for the time but none that I would expect to find in your corner book store.

Now back to Bazaar . As I said I was hooked the first time I read it. And this time it was even better because using Google Earth and Google Maps one can get a pretty good picture of where he is, how he was traveling and what he was seeing. So this is Theroux in his first book, already at the top of his game and a book to spend an evening of two with now in 2013 just as it was when I read in forty years ago. And I guarantee you will like it too

This fabulous account of getting on the train in London and riding trains (including the decrepit Orient Express) through Europe, across Asia as far east as Japan, then looping back to Europe on the Trans-Siberian, is not a bit dated, even though it was first published in 1975. Theroux is sometimes cross and prickly, but he doesn't miss a thing, and he ventures into places (and eats things) that most people never would. Because he is also a novelist, he's deft at limning the appearances and characters of the people he meets, and these people, who are variously vain, odd, smelly, crazy, foolish, bigoted, or just eccentric, give this travelogue--and indeed all of Theroux's travel narratives--the quality of a Dickens novel.

I've read and enjoyed several of his other rail narratives, including "The Old Patagonian Express" (Central and South America) , "Kingdom by the Sea" (United Kingdom), and "Dark Star Safari" (Africa). I'd start with this one, though, with its wonderful section on Vietnam in the last year of the war and its melancholy voyage across Leonid Brezhnev's sclerotic Soviet Union. As with all good books, it will transport you to places you did not know existed, even in this era of Google Earth. As for those who don't care for Theroux's sometimes cranky persona, well, there are always the twittering ecstasies of Peter Mayle ("A Year in Provence," etc.) or--worse--Frances Mayes ("Under the Tuscan Sun," etc.). Theroux's sojourns will never inspire busloads of tourists or the astronomical appreciation of the local real estate. Once you've read "The Great Railway Bazaar," be sure to follow it up with "Ghost Train to the Eastern Star," his recent (2009) account of his retracing (with some new stops) of the trip he took in the seventies. It's equally compelling, and it illuminates the story of the first trip.

In 1973 Theroux was a struggling novelist barely scraping by in London with wife and kid when he got the idea to take trains across Europe and Asia write a book about it. Good idea. It made his career (that, and his long, fortuitous association with Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul, who served as his mentor and entree in literary London.)Re-reading The Great Railway Bazaar after some 30 years I found that it still intrigued--though I was struck by how sardonic Theroux is throughout. But that sarcasm and wit kept me turning pages--along with his novelist's craft, an eye for anomaly, and a string of eccentric characters he encounters on his route. The book also serves up some time traveling--gone now are Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, the Shah of Iran, Ceylon, and Burma, at least in name. Also affecting was the knowledge, from today's perspective, of the wars and horrors soon to be visited in coming decades on the people he meets across both Europe and Asia.

This was the very first travel book I ever read. My parents had early on inspired in me a love of travel. Reading this book increased that desire to explore the world. Coincidentally, I also shared a love of traveling by train, though as the author frequently mentions, this can often be somewhat difficult, and at times downright unpleasant.
While some people consider Paul Theroux to be cynical, I prefer to think of him as a realist who does not feel the need to sugar coat any of his writing.
Part of embracing travel is to deal with the good and the bad,the same as many life experiences.
I feel that the author was a pioneer in his belief that the journey is sometimes more rewarding than the destination itself.
If you've never read any of Paul Theroux's works, you got some great reads to look forward to !

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 [[ASIN:1437826733 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 ([[ASIN:0142437190 In Patagonia]]) who really did move the state of the art of travel writing out of the 19th century into a modern aesthetic.

I'd been meaning to read Theroux's "The Great Railway Bazaar" for the past 20 years. When the travel book first made it on my radar in the late 1980s, I was myself starting to travel the world, but I kept putting off reading the book because I thought it would be dated, slightly offensive, and filled with obvious and superficial observations by a grumpy old man. Well, I finally got around to reading "Bazaar" and it's everything I thought it would be -- and also more fun and engaging than I would have imagined it could be. Theroux sets off on a four-month journey by rail from London to Tokyo, swinging through Southeast Asia and Russia along the way. He catches rides on some of the most storied trains, including the Orient Express and the Khyber Pass Local, and meets a bunch of colorful locals and expats. Theroux fills each stop with enough details, anecdotes and historical background to make this an easy and informative read. He also recognizes that any literal trip is ultimately also a figurative one of self-realization: "The farther one traveled, the nakeder one got, until, towards the end, ceasing to be animated by any scene, one was most oneself." And after this epiphany, a traveler is finally ready to return back to his or her loved ones with a greater appreciation of and a deeper perspective on life. In a book filled with great one-liners -- including the famous opening line -- Theroux writes late in the story, near the end of his epic, continental loop, "the grand tour is just the inspired man's way of heading home."

This is the third Paul Theroux I have read this summer, and I think it's now safe to say that he is quickly becoming one of my favorite authors. The Great Railway Bazaar recounts his travels by train during the 1970's through Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Asia and then from Japan back to Moscow via the Trans-Siberian. In this particular travelogue, Theroux is far more an observer of people than places. He spends little time recording what he experienced off the trains, tying together, instead, a series of encounters he has with strangers on the train. I love the idea of conversing with strangers on railways, and Theroux's reflections on the phenomena very much resonate with me:

"The conversation, like many others I had with people on trains, derived an easy candor from the shared journey, the comfort of the dining car, and the certain knowledge that neither of us would see each other again. The railway was a fictor's bazaar, in which anyone with patience could carry away a memory to pore over in privacy. The memories were inconclusive, but an ending, as in the best fiction, was always implied" (69-70). How wonderful.

The interesting thing about this book is that Theroux manages to give readers a sense of the countries traversed by the trains without spending much time describing those countries. He argues that a train car itself reflects something profound about the train's place:

"The trains in any country contain the essential paraphernalia of the culture: Thai trains have the shower jar with the glazed dragon on its side, Ceylonese ones the car reserved for Buddhist monks, Indian ones a vegetarian kitchen and six classes, Iranian ones prayer mats, Malaysian ones a noodle stall, Vietnamese ones bulletproof glass on the locomotive, and on every carriage of a Russian train there is a samovar" (209).

And, Theroux's internal landscape is as much a part of this book as the external landscape through which he travels: "The farther one traveled, the nakeder one got...travel writing, which cannot but be droll at the onset, moves from journalism to fiction, arriving as promptly as the Kodama Echo at autobiography. From there any further travel makes a beeline to confession, the embarrassed monologue in a deserted bazaar" (299).

This book is a downhill ride after the first beautiful sentence. My expectations for "The Great Railway Bazaar" were high because I had read reviews of other travel books that were compared to Paul Theroux's book. I thought perhaps this was the benchmark by which all other travel writing was measured.

The notion of someone travelling across Asia by train seemed interesting. I was disappointed that Mr. Theroux spent so much effort describing the sexual anecdotes and proclivities of those he met. And how many times is it necessary to be told that people are defecating by the tracks? And just how interesting is it to hear Mr. Theroux's difficulties in securing whatever the local grog may be?

This book does describe some interesting people and interesting situations, but it certainly is not a classic to me. "The Great Railway Bazaar" simply spends too much time repeating the same bits of ugliness encountered at the various stops along the way for me to recommend it to anyone.

Combine train travel, Asia and a talented writer and you expect an interesting book. It may be the day to day travelogue style or the boring time in history, but this book did not resonate for me. The writing was adequate, but I learned little about the author or his views, train travel, the countries (a bit), the travel companions or the cultures.

What a pleasure to read. The writing is crisp and entertaining. The tales are fun without being hyperbole. Only a few chapters in and I feel that I am on the trip with the author.
Highly recommended.

NOTE: This book is even better on audiobook to help recreate the voices and inflection of the author. The sarcasm and irony comes through even better in the spoken word. Loved it.