REPORT: Travel Is Everything

A review of Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, by Paul Theroux

In fact Ghost Train draws so generously from other sources that it sometimes reads like a book report: Georges Simenon, Wordsworth, V.S. Pritchett, V.S. Naipaul, Greene, Kurban Said, Leonard Woolf, and a score of others make their appearance alongside the Azerbaijanis and Cambodians, the Indians, the Russians, the Japanese. There are also several long conversations with living writers—Elif Shafak, whose beauty and brains give Theroux a case of the stuttering blushes, Orhan Pamuk, Haruki Murakami, the late Sir Arthur C. Clarke, Pico Iyer.

Theroux is a cataloger, a collector, as evidenced by his exhibition of other writers’ work and the stories of people he meets (on this trip he’s also hunting a few less abstract souvenirs, namely reverse-glass paintings and religious icons). Here one catches a glimpse of the traveling mythomaniac described in Ghost Train’s first paragraphs. Hoarding stuff—even stories—is startlingly easy to understand as a vain activity, fruitless and self-absorbed (“So I guess – what? – writing’s your hobby?”). As Jean Baudrillard, the astute observer of both Americans and postmodernity, put it: “What you collect is always yourself.”

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