Paul Theroux - To the Ends of the Earth: The Selected Travels of Paul Theroux

[His] powers of description and knack at turning a phrase are arresting. Wonderful.

The Flint Journal

A unique view of our global village as experienced through a unique writers eyes and ears Like a modern Ulysses His writings are proof that getting there may be most of the fun.

Houston Chronicle

An enticing selection of travel writings by one of the premier travel writers in the English language Theroux has the ability of penetrating to the heart of wherever he journeys. [Hes] a top-notch travel writer.

Magill Book Reviews

Scintillating Theroux will never tell you about the best hotel in town because, chances are, hes never stayed there. He has, however, stayed in working class residences here and there, absorbing local color, prevailing attitudes and prejudices of the inhabitants. TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH offers selections from some truly unique, exotic travel adventures. [Its] a super book, a collection of journeys to some strange places, described by a fine writer who couldnt write a dull, trite line if he tried. Extremely well done.

Coast Book Review Service

Fiction:
WALDO
FONG AND THE INDIANS
GIRLS AT PLAY
JUNGLE LOVERS
SINNING WITH ANNIE and Other Stories
SAINT JACK
THE BLACK HOUSE
THE FAMILY ARSENAL
THE CONSULS FILE
A CHRISTMAS CARD
PICTURE PALACE
LONDON SNOW
WORLDS END
THE MOSQUITO COAST
THE LONDON EMBASSY
HALF MOON STREET
O-ZONE
MY SECRET HISTORY
CHICAGO LOOP
MILLROY THE MAGICIAN
MY OTHER LIFE
KOWLOON TONG
HOTEL HONOLULU
STRANGER AT THE PALAZZO DORO
BLINDING LIGHT
THE ELEPHANTA SUITE
A DEAD HAND

Criticism:
V.S. NAIPAUL

Nonfiction:
THE GREAT RAILWAY BAZAAR
THE OLD PATAGONIAN EXPRESS
THE KINGDOM BY THE SEA
SAILING THROUGH CHINA
SUNRISE WITH SEAMONSTERS
THE IMPERIAL WAY
RIDING THE IRON ROOSTER: By Train Through China
TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH
THE HAPPY ISLES OF OCEANIA
SIR VIDIAS SHADOW
FRESH AIR FIEND
NURSE WOLF AND DR. SACKS
DARK STAR SAFARI
GHOST TRAIN TO THE EASTERN STAR

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An Ivy Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright 1990, 1991 by Paul Theroux
Photographs copyright 1991 by Carin Riley

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Ivy Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

This work was originally published in different form in Great Britain as Traveling the World by Sinclair-Stevenson Limited, London, in 1990. Portions of this work were previously published separately in The Great Railway Bazaar, Sunrise with Seamonsters, The Old Patagonian Express, The Kingdom by the Sea, and Riding the Iron Rooster.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
EMI MUSIC PUBLISHING AND CAREERSBMG MUSIC PUBLISHING, INC.: Excerpt from Oh, Carol by Neil Sedaka and Howard Greenfield. Copyright 1959, 1960 by Screen GemsEMI Music, Inc. Copyright renewed 1987, 1988 by Screen GemsEMI Music, Inc./CareersBMG Music Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.
HARCOURT BRACE JOVANOVICH, INC., AND FABER AND FABER, LIMITED: Excerpt from East Coker from Four Quarters by T. S. Eliot. Copyright 1943 by T. S. Eliot. Copyright renewed 1971 by Esme Valerie Eliot. Rights throughout the world excluding the United States are controlled by Faber and Faber Limited. Reprinted by permission.

Ivy Books and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

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eISBN: 978-0-307-79027-9

v3.1

To Anne Theroux,
who made it possible for me
to go on these journeys.

My father was full of Sayings, the Hawaiian said. He told me once, Kaniela, remember this. No matter where you go, thats where you are.

I HAD BEEN TRAVELING FOR MORE THAN TEN YEARSIN E UROPE , Asia, and Africaand it had not occurred to me to write a travel book. I had always somewhat disliked travel books: they seemed self-indulgent, unfunny, and rather selective. I had the idea that the travel writer left a great deal out of his or her book and put all the wrong things in. I hated sight-seeing, and yet that was what constituted much of the travel writers material: the pyramids, the Taj Mahal, the Vatican, the paintings here, the mosaics there. In an age of mass tourism, everyone set off to see the same things, and that was what travel writing seemed to be about. I am speaking of the 1960s and early 1970s.

The travel book was a bore. A bore wrote it and a bore read itI could just imagine the sort of finger-wetting spud in carpet slippers who used his library card as bookmark, and called himself an armchair traveler. As for the writer, it annoyed me that a traveler would suppress his or her moments of desperation or fear or lust. Or the time he or she screamed at a taxi driver, or was picked up by a plausible local, or slept until noon. And what did they eat, what books did they read to kill time, and what were the toilets like? I had done enough traveling to know that half of travel was delay or nuisancebuses breaking down and hotel clerks being rude and market traders being rapacious. The truth of travel was unexpected and off-key, and few people ever wrote about it.

Now and then one would find this reality in a bookEvelyn Waugh being mistaken for his brother Alec in Labels, or the good intentions and bad temper in parts of Naipauls An Area of Darkness, a superbly structured book, deeply personal and imaginative and informative, but wayward, too. I saw it in the humor and the dialogue in Trollopes The West Indies and the Spanish Main.

An unlikely source, Nabokovs Laughter in the Dark, vividly illustrates this sort of travel writing. One of the characters says, A writer for instance talks about India which I have seen, and gushes about dancing girls, tiger hunts, fakirs, betel nuts, serpents: the Glamour of the Mysterious East. But what does it amount to? Nothing. Instead of visualizing India I merely get a bad toothache from all these Eastern delights. Now, theres the other way, as for instance, the fellow who writes: Before turning in, I put out my wet boots to dry and in the morning I found that a thick blue forest had grown on them (Fungi, Madam, he explained) and at once India becomes alive for me. The rest is shop.

When something human is recorded, good travel writing happens.

The tripthe itinerarywas another essential; and so many travel books I read had grown out of a travelers chasing around a city or a little countryDiscovering Portugal, that kind of thing. It was not travel at all, but rather a form of extended residence that I knew well from having myself lived in Malawi and Uganda and Singapore and England. I had come to rest in those places, I was working, I had a local drivers license, I went shopping every Saturday. It had never occurred to me to write a travel book about any of it. Travel had to do with movement and truth, with trying everything, offering yourself to experience and then reporting it. And I felt that television had put the sightseers out of business.