Ghost Train to the Eastern Star
28,000 Miles in Search of the Railway Bazaar
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4.6 • 10 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The acclaimed author of The Great Railway Bazaar retraces his legendary journey through Europe and Asia in this “funny, informative and lyrical” travelogue (The Guardian, UK).
Paul Theroux virtually invented the modern travel narrative by recounting his 25,000-mile journey by train through eastern Europe, central Asia, the Indian subcontinent, China, Japan, and Siberia. Three decades later, the world he recorded in The Great Railway Bazaar has undergone phenomenal change. The Soviet Union has collapsed and China has risen; India booms while Burma smothers under dictatorship; Vietnam flourishes in the aftermath of the havoc America was unleashing on it the last time Theroux passed through.
Now Theroux returns to capture the texture, sights, smells, and sounds of this new landscape. Theroux’s odyssey takes him from eastern Europe, still hung-over from communism. He experiences a tense but thriving Turkey, and a Georgia limping back toward feudalism while its neighbor Azerbaijan revels in oil-fueled capitalism. Through it all, Theroux travels as the locals do—by train, bus, taxi, and foot; he encounters fellow writers, including Orhan Pamuk, Haruki Murakami, and Arthur C. Clarke; and, as always, his omnivorous curiosity and unerring eye for detail capture it all.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Acclaimed travel writer and novelist Theroux hasn't lost his affection for trains, but his view of the scenery outside has darkened in his latest odyssey. Reprising the itinerary of his 1973 The Great Railway Bazaar (with a detour around Iran and Afghanistan into the Central Asian republics), Theroux takes a contrarian stance toward the transformation of Asia over the intervening decades. The persistence of familiar, authentic, rural decrepitude usually heartens him, while the teeming modernity of great cities the computer-and-oxcart madhouses of Mumbai and Bangalore, the neurotic orderliness of Singapore, the soullessness of Tokyo appalls. The book is often an elegy for fixity in a globalizing age when everyone is a traveler anxious to get to America and "the world is deteriorating and shrinking to a ball of bungled desolation." Fortunately, Theroux is too rapt an observer of his surroundings and himself to wallow long in reaction or nostalgia; readers will find his usual wonderfully evocative landscapes and piquant character sketches (and, everywhere, prostitutes soliciting him most stylishly in Hanoi, where they ride up on motorcycles crying, "You come! Boom-boom!"). No matter where his journey takes him, Theroux always sends back dazzling post cards.
