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The Great Railway Bazaar Paperback – June 1, 2006
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In 1973, Paul Theroux embarked on a four-month journey by train from the United Kingdom through Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. In The Great Railway Bazaar, he records in vivid detail and penetrating insight the many fascinating incidents, adventures, and encounters of his grand, intercontinental tour.
Asia's fabled trains—the Orient Express, the Khyber Pass Local, the Frontier Mail, the Golden Arrow to Kuala Lumpur, the Mandalay Express, the Trans-Siberian Express—are the stars of a journey that takes Theroux on a loop eastbound from London's Victoria Station to Tokyo Central, then back from Japan on the Trans-Siberian. Brimming with Theroux's signature humor and wry observations, this engrossing chronicle is essential reading for both the ardent adventurer and the armchair traveler.
- Print length352 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherMariner Books
- Publication dateJune 1, 2006
- Dimensions5.5 x 0.89 x 8.25 inches
- ISBN-100618658947
- ISBN-13978-0618658947
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It’s as if Graham Greene and Joseph Conrad decided to rewrite Baedeker’s guides to Asia…[a] great read.”—Newsweek “Wonderful…full of zest and adventure.”—Washington Post “A travel book of the first magnitude.”—Business Week —
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Product details
- Publisher : Mariner Books; Reprint edition (June 1, 2006)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 352 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0618658947
- ISBN-13 : 978-0618658947
- Item Weight : 10.6 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.5 x 0.89 x 8.25 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #83,524 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #132 in Travel Writing Reference
- #203 in Travelogues & Travel Essays
- #6,117 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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About the author
Paul Theroux was born and educated in the United States. After graduating from university in 1963, he travelled first to Italy and then to Africa, where he worked as a Peace Corps teacher at a bush school in Malawi, and as a lecturer at Makerere University in Uganda. In 1968 he joined the University of Singapore and taught in the Department of English for three years. Throughout this time he was publishing short stories and journalism, and wrote a number of novels. Among these were Fong and the Indians, Girls at Play and Jungle Lovers, all of which appear in one volume, On the Edge of the Great Rift (Penguin, 1996).
In the early 1970s Paul Theroux moved with his wife and two children to Dorset, where he wrote Saint Jack, and then on to London. He was a resident in Britain for a total of seventeen years. In this time he wrote a dozen volumes of highly praised fiction and a number of successful travel books, from which a selection of writings were taken to compile his book Travelling the World (Penguin, 1992). Paul Theroux has now returned to the United States, but he continues to travel widely.
Paul Theroux's many books include Picture Palace, which won the 1978 Whitbread Literary Award; The Mosquito Coast, which was the 1981 Yorkshire Post Novel of the Year and joint winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was also made into a feature film; Riding the Iron Rooster, which won the 1988 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award; The Pillars of Hercules, shortlisted for the 1996 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award; My Other Life: A Novel, Kowloon Tong, Sir Vidia's Shadow, Fresh-air Fiend and Hotel Honolulu. Blindness is his latest novel. Most of his books are published by Penguin.
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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
The author may not be able to be called a "misanthrope" in the strict definition of the word, but he comes close. So this is our traveling companion in the otherwise "great railway bazaar," and there is no letup in the way that he sees and experiences life.