The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia

Rating:
Summary: Obsolete and almost racist
Review: This book may have been a pleasant read when it appeared in the mid 70's, but today, it is definitely unsavory. The attitude of Mr. Theroux toward non-americans is that of a visitor at a zoo. Toward women, it is somewhat worse. The info. on the trains is poor. I read the book to daydream of a trip to Burma, and I hope the country would be more interesting than what Mr. Theroux described 25 years ago.

Rating:
Summary: Not bad at all
Review: This is a journal of a trip covering the major rail routes available in the 1970s across Europe and Asia. Theroux, an American, sets off from London on a tour where the journey itself was the goal. He wanted to sit back, observe, and absorb the atmosphere of the trains. In the book, he details his experiences on the trains, tells us about his fellow passengers, and describes what he was seeing out the windows while the trains wound across the tracks from Paris to Italy, Bulgaria to Turkey, Pakistan, India, Ceylon, Burma, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, Japan, and the Soviet Union. Occasionally, he stopped for a night or two in a hotel along the way, and he also tells us of his adventures at these stops.

It's been years since I read a book by Paul Theroux. In the past, I found his attitude a bit off-putting. There's something about deciding to write a travel book, then taking a trip for the specific purpose of having something to write about that makes the whole genre somewhat useless. But now that I have traveled a bit more myself and have visited many of the countries that Theroux describes here, I can appreciate the accuracy of his descriptions much more. In traveling through a country in a few days by train, no one would be able to make enough observations to make worthwhile analyses of the culture or the society of a country, but that's not Theroux's goal in this book. Instead, it is the journey itself that he is describing- -the focus is on the trains, and the particular subculture of train travel. Theroux provides us with images of the trains themselves and the people one meets on them as he describes his experiences of months spent living on the trains.

Theroux's best descriptions are towards the beginning of the journey. By the end of the trip, he is reduced to a drunken stupor and his observations dwindle in the steppes of Siberia. The only reason for including his final chapters in the book are simply for the sake of completeness, to get him home again. The section on Vietnam is a remarkable snapshot of ordinary life trying to continue between the '73 ceasefire and the '75 withdrawal. It is images like these that give this book its enduring value.

Rating:
Summary: Not bad at all
Review: This is a journal of a trip covering the major rail routes available in the 1970s across Europe and Asia. Theroux, an American, sets off from London on a tour where the journey itself was the goal. He wanted to sit back, observe, and absorb the atmosphere of the trains. In the book, he details his experiences on the trains, tells us about his fellow passengers, and describes what he was seeing out the windows while the trains wound across the tracks from Paris to Italy, Bulgaria to Turkey, Pakistan, India, Ceylon, Burma, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, Japan, and the Soviet Union. Occasionally, he stopped for a night or two in a hotel along the way, and he also tells us of his adventures at these stops.

It's been years since I read a book by Paul Theroux. In the past, I found his attitude a bit off-putting. There's something about deciding to write a travel book, then taking a trip for the specific purpose of having something to write about that makes the whole genre somewhat useless. But now that I have traveled a bit more myself and have visited many of the countries that Theroux describes here, I can appreciate the accuracy of his descriptions much more. In traveling through a country in a few days by train, no one would be able to make enough observations to make worthwhile analyses of the culture or the society of a country, but that's not Theroux's goal in this book. Instead, it is the journey itself that he is describing- -the focus is on the trains, and the particular subculture of train travel. Theroux provides us with images of the trains themselves and the people one meets on them as he describes his experiences of months spent living on the trains.

Theroux's best descriptions are towards the beginning of the journey. By the end of the trip, he is reduced to a drunken stupor and his observations dwindle in the steppes of Siberia. The only reason for including his final chapters in the book are simply for the sake of completeness, to get him home again. The section on Vietnam is a remarkable snapshot of ordinary life trying to continue between the '73 ceasefire and the '75 withdrawal. It is images like these that give this book its enduring value.