In this new book Theroux has attempted a replay, offering up a narrative of a masochistic two-month rail journey from his parents' house in Medford, Mass., all the way through Mexico and Central America to the southern tip of South America, the remoteĪnd barren Patagonia celebrated two years ago by Theroux's friend Bruce Chatwin in his excellent "In Patagonia," another book Douglas would approve. Great Railway Bazaar" of four years ago, his account of a rail trip from London to Japan and back again, full of characters, scandals and disasters. Not necessarily, though by preference, of his own forging- and the courage to proclaim it and put it to the test he must be naïf and profound, both child and sage." A book Douglas would have liked was Paul Theroux's "The The writer should therefore possess a brain worth exploring some philosophy of life. the ideal book of this kind offers us, indeed, a triple opportunity of exploration- abroad, into the author's brain, and into our own. We now have books instructing us how to save money and time but with rare exceptions, such as Herbert Kubly's "Stranger in Italy" (1956), we have few any more that satisfy the requirements laid down by Norman Douglasĥ0 years ago: "The reader of a good travel-book is entitled not only to an exterior voyage, to descriptions of scenery and so forth, but to an interior, a sentimental or temperamental voyage, which takes place side by side with that The guide book, compiled by committees under the supervision of Eugene Fodor or Temple Fielding, has "replaced" the travelīook. Lawrence and John Dos Passos and Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh. Ne of the casualties of travel by jet, together with civilized cuisine and the notion that people are not sardines, is the old-style travel book, the sort that used
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