Arrested Development - Ex-Pats Mexico

Here's another one HD. Paul Theroux has written a followup to his breakthrough book "The Great Railway Bazaar" written 33 years ago, retraveling the same railway. The book is "Ghost Train to the Eastern Star". It would be interesting to reread the first, then the later. People call you 'irascible' - well you are a sweetheart compared to Theroux. Here is a small excerpt:
"Travel can induce such a distinct and nameless feeling of strangeness and disconnection in me that I feel insubstantial, like a puff of smoke, merely a ghost, a creepy revenant from the underworld, unobserved and watchful among real people, wandering, listening while remaining unseen. Being invisible — the usual condition of the older traveler — is much more useful than being obvious. You see more, you are not interrupted, you are ignored. Such a traveler isn't in a hurry, which is why you might mistake him for a bum. Hating schedules, depending on chance encounters, I am attracted by travel's slow tempo.
Ghosts have all the time in the world, another pleasure of long-distance aimlessness — traveling at half speed on slow trains and procrastinating. And this ghostliness, I was to find, was also an effect of the journey I had chosen, returning to places I had known many years ago. It is almost impossible to return to an early scene in your traveling life and not feel
like a specter. And many places I saw were themselves sad and spectral, others big and hectic, while I was the haunting presence, the eavesdropping shadow on the ghost train."

Haven't met Hound-dog in person, nor Paul Theroux.
Of the two. Writers. Agree that da dog might be more a 'sweet-heart'. In the flesh.

However fleeting, temporal...that condition.

Read a number of Theroux's travel books, some years back. He contributed to the genre. Some might even muse he set a 'standard' to which many aspiring travel writers might have aspired to.

Then by a quirk perhaps of fate, read, his book, 'Sir Vidia's Shadow', Theroux's personal account of his POV of his thirty-year old relationship with writer, V.S. Naipaul. After that book and slogging through his book about Oceania, was not longer much of a fan.

Personally, think that in many circumstances, the less a reader knows about the personal life of a writer, and their history of personal relationships. The better.

That way, the reader is freer to trust, and enter that particular kind of 'intimate', relationship possibly, between writer and reader.

The Dawg is a huge fan of Paul Theroux´ non-fiction books - most recently Dark Star Safari in which he writes of travels in Africa and expresses, among other things, his disdain for the NGOs that supposedly provide various form of humanitarian aid to that continent. While I have enjoyed several of his travel books, this one really hit home because Dawg hitchhiked about Africa from Cairo to Tanzania as a young man in the 1960s when just about all other foreign travelers were Peace Corps members or missionaries or aid workers. I share Theroux´ low assessment of these phonies who exploit Africans for their own personal aggrandizement. The book put into words those feelings I have harbored for some 40 years now and I was enthralled by his grasp of what is so terribly wrong about this exploitation of the poor for the sake of the "committed".

I see the same thing happening today in Chiapas with the exploiters being everyone from zealous protestant missionaries to university "researchers" to NGO officials spending grant money to Mexico City intellectual Zapatista dilettantes promising campesinos a standard of living they cannot deliver. It is criminal and heartbreaking and an enormous waste of scarce resources which could truly be put to effective use to help the poor.

Well, Gary, you managed to entice me onto my soapbox. We make our homes at Lake Chapala and in San Cristóbal de Las Casas but our hearts are in stunningly beautiful Chiapas, not Peoria Upon Sump (Ajijic). When I fly into Tuxtla airport and see the missionary groups de-board their jet buses and gather to plan their assault on local indigenous community values and infrastructure, I take it quite personally but can do nothing about it.

I don't know, but one of my most memorable "theroux" moments is when he relates that as a young academic in Africa, he is having a steamy, sexual relationship with a local woman. She is begging him to 'make a baby with her', and I remember thinking that, wow, this was sure different than typical western, womanly thinking of the day. Then it turns out she is already pregnant with another man's child, and she was trying trying to trick him. That seemed to 'internationalise' human nature for me!

Theroux and Minchener are two writers that IMO aren't worth reading. Theoux's Patagonia Express started in Mexico and was so far off the mark all I could do was wonder how far from reality were his descriptions of the countries further south.

Minchener had the same very subjective style. In his book "The Travelers" which was his moralistic view of the young "hound dogs" of the world traveling through Europe and North Africa in the late 60's he wrote of a young male going into an LSD induced coma! I tossed the book into the Mahandi River in the north of the Bay of Bengal. I don't recall in detail the crap Theroux wrote about Mexico but it was equally ignorant. Such glaring factual errors make these writers unreadable to me.

Now you done made the Dawg mad, i.e., if he is yet firing on all cylinders. Can't wait to get the old healthy Dawg back. He is our best B.S. barometer.

Now you done made the Dawg mad, i.e., if he is yet firing on all cylinders. Can't wait to get the old healthy Dawg back. He is our best B.S. barometer.

Thats a large body of work to write off!

Theroux did not seem to be interested in Mexico at all - yet he was very interested in Central America, especially Costa Rica. His novel 'Mosquito Coast' is supposedly set in Honduras, is much better than the movie, and uniquely describes how the tropical jungle can devour modern man http://www.amazon.com/Mosquito-Coast-Pa ... 0140060898

Likewise Michener did not seem to be that interested in Mexico, he began an epic novel 'Mexico' but it was thirty years before he completed it. I have not read it, my father did, and he enjoyed it - but he has a fascination with bullfighting which this novel goes into in great length.

None of these authors wrote about Canada, as far as I know.

I read Mosquito Coast. Reinforced my opinion of the writer. The book was garbage IMO.