The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road Review

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The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road ReviewIn addition to being one of the finest American writers of fiction of the late 20th Century, Paul Theroux is arguably the outstanding travel writer of his generation, having written brilliantly (and contentiously) about his many solo adventures the width and length of the Americas, Asia, and Africa, as well as tours around the Pacific Rim, Mediterranean and the British Isles. His writing is as honest and sincere, and reveals as much about the writer as the countries and people he encounters along the way. He is also a great student of the writing of others, many of whom helped shape his own writing. His travelogues are filled with references to writers like Vladimir Nabakov, Anthony Burgess, Somerset Maugham, and his former friend V.S. Naipaul, as well as legendary travel writers like Paul Bowles, Richard Halliburton, and the last of the great British adventurers, Wilfred Thesiger.
For this volume Theroux has assembled a collection of his own brief essays along with quotes and essays from great travel writers, a class that for Therous includes not only writers of travelogues like Eric Newby but also authors like Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson and Evelyn Waugh, all of whom had much to say about their travel experiences. Each chapter is in the form of an essay about some aspect of travel- food, company, railways, walking, calamities, Englishmen escaping England- and is in the form of an essay, augmented by quotes from various writers (including Theroux himself) on a particular theme. There's even a chapter on staying home, and one entitled "Imaginary Journeys."
One chapter (by way of illustration) is entitled "How Long Did the Traveler Spend Traveling?" Theroux begins by noting that D. H. Lawrence managed to get an entire book out of one week spent with his wife in Sardinia, while Marco Polo spent twenty-six years in China. He discusses journeys notable for their length (Sir John Mandeville, thirty four years, if he in fact ever left England) and their brevity (Lawrence, and Kipling, who never did make it to Mandalay.) In between we find Graham Green (six weeks in Mexico) Jean Cocteau (eighty days) and many others.
This is not, as you might suspect, yet another compilation of the writings of others, hastily assembled by someone anxious to get a book out to cash in on their reputation or fulfill a contract. The great bulk of the text is by Theroux himself, comprising his opinions and judgments, and it reads as well as any of his travel books. Theroux uses quotes from other writers to illustrate and illuminate his points, such as this excerpt by Georges Simenon from the chapter on railways: "That feeling about trains, for instance. Of course he had long outgrown the boyish glamour of the steam engine. Yet there was something that had an appeal for him in trains, especially in night trains, which always put queer, vaguely improper notions in his head." This certainly resonates with much of what Theroux himself has written about his rail voyages, traveling alone across Asia or through Europe.
Paul Theroux has been writing for over forty years now, during which time he's produced around a dozen travel books and easily twice as many novels. As he is approaching his seventieth birthday, it is not reasonable to assume that his future globetrotting will be w=more limited than it has been in the past, and that we will not see many more books like "The Great Railway Bazaar" or "The Happy Isles of Oceania." For those of us who greedily devour any and all of his works, and who especially look forward to the publication of his travel writings, this collection is especially welcome.
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