Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: On the Tracks of the Great Railway Bazaar - Couverture souple

"Spectacular . . . as much an emotional journey as a physical pilgrimage." — Christian Science Monitor

"With the world on a fast train to the godforsaken, Theroux counsels you to take the local — with its longueurs, aromas, riddles, and many stations." — San Francisco Chronicle

"Engaging and brilliant . . . can only add to his stature as one of our most original and agile writers." — Minneapolis Star Tribune

"An elegy for an epic writing career and a diminishing world . . . few writers can so precisely capture the strange qualities of travel." — Outside

"In Ghost Train to the Eastern Star Theroux retraces the path he took 33 years earlier, assessing with his sharp eye and astringent pen what has changed and what has remained the same in the people and cultures he first encountered in his early 30s." — Chicago Tribune

"Theroux takes us not to mere places, but to regions in the mind that we likely haven’t known before." — Rocky Mountain News

"Theroux puts the brakes on his relentless momentum long enough to deliver some of his strongest writing and rewarding commentary on his beloved India . . . His prose explodes with texture, depth, and wisdom." — Boston Globe

"Traveling 28,000 miles with Paul Theroux is a lot like traveling the world with a long-lost friend." — Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

"Brilliant. No one writes with Theroux's head-on intensity and raptness, and his descriptions made me want to jump on the next plane to Istanbul (and also, of course, to many of the other places he evokes). I particularly loved the spectral motif, the ghosts and shadows and underground presences that flit through the narrative, giving the whole a half-seen and haunting dimension that no book of travels I've ever read conjures up." — Pico Iyer

"Much of his writing reflects affection for the people in whose midst he is apt to find himself, and a spirit of inquiry that is part anthropological and part autobiographical." — Wall Street Journal

"Theroux is the ultimate globetrotter, finding something of value wherever he roams." — The Atlantic

"Brightly rendered and endlessly informative, it serves up one sharp, insightful anecdote or historical tidbit after another . . . Theroux's fresh phrasing is a treat whether he's evoking the desolation of rural Turkmenistan, the heat of Jodhpur or a massage in Bangkok." — Seattle Times

"Mature and thoroughly engrossing . . . We are the author’s companions rather than the audience for his tales." — Los Angeles Times

"Theroux fans are likely to enjoy every episode of this latest adventure." — Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"Here's a toast to a career-capping classic from a travel writing mentor and master." —National Geographic Traveler

 

.readers will find his usual wonderfully evocative landscapes and piquant character sketches...No matter where his journey takes him, Theroux always sends back dazzling post cards." Publishers Weekly, Starred

"Theroux wanders to places that scarcely cross other travel writers' minds, among tham Vientiane ('a sleepy town on the banks of the muddy river, famous for its cheap beer') and Phnom Penh ('scruffy, rather beaten-up...like a scarred human face in which its violent past was evident'). He also keeps up a running argument with the books he reads along the way, to say nothing of his contemporaries )Chatwin never traveled alone, he harumphs, and neither does his bete noire Naipaul."

Kirkus Reviews

"Brilliant. No one writes with theroux's head-on intensity and raptness, and his descriptions made me want to jump on the next plane to Istanbul (and also, of course, to many of the other places he evokes). I particularly loved the spectral motif, the ghosts and shadows and underground presences that flit through the narrative, giving the whole a half-seen and haunting dimension that no book of travels I've ever read conjures up." --Pico Iyer

“As thoughtful and observant as ever...this trip finds Theroux reflecting not only on changes to the landscape but also to himself...a wonderful book infused with the insights of maturity...it’s a reminder that in this age of increasingly homogenous urban centers and easy air travel, those who really want to discern national differences should stay on the ground.”

Booklist, ALA, Starred Review

Long after I took the trip I wrote about in The Great Railway Bazaar I went on thinking how I’d gone overland, changing trains across Asia, improvising my trip, rubbing against the world. And reflecting on what I’d seen – the way the unrevisited past is always looping in your dreams. Memory is a ghost train too. Ages later, you still ponder the beautiful face you once glimpsed in a distant country. Or the sight of a noble tree, or a country road, or a happy table in a café, or some angry boys armed with rusty spears shrieking, “Run you life, dim-dim!” – or the sound of a train at night, striking that precise musical note of train whistles, a diminished third, into the darkness, as you lie in the train, moving through the world as travelers do, “inside the whale.”

Thirty-three years went by. I was then twice as old as the person who had ridden those trains, most of them pulled by steam locomotives, boiling across the hinterland of Turkey and India. I loved the symmetry in the time difference. Time passing had become something serious to me, embodied in the process of my growing old. As a young man I regarded the earth as a fixed and trustworthy thing that would see me into my old age; but older, I began to understand transformation as a natural law, something emotional in an undependable world that was visibly spoiled. It is only with age that you acquire the gift to evaluate decay, the epiphany of Wordsworth, the wisdom of wabi-sabi: nothing is perfect, nothing is complete, nothing lasts. . . .

Traveling into the darkness of a late-winter evening, knowing that I would be waking up in Vienna only to change trains, I felt that my trip had actually begun, that everything that had happened until now was merely a prelude. What intensified this feeling was the sight of the sodden, deep green meadows, the shadowy river, the bare trees, a chilly feeling of foreignness, and the sense that I had no clear idea where I was but only the knowledge that late tonight we would be passing through Strasbourg on the German border and tomorrow morning we’d be in Austria, and around noon in Budapest, where I’d catch another train. The rhythm of these clanging rails and the routine of changing trains would lead me into central Asia, since it was just a sequence of railway journeys from here to Tashkent in Uzbekistan.

A lovely feeling warmed me, the true laziness of the long-distance traveler. There was no other place I wished to be than right here in the corner seat, slightly tipsy from the wine and full of bouillabaisse, the rain lashing the window.

I did not know it then, of course, but I would be traveling through rain and wind all the way through Turkey, on the Black Sea coast, through Georgia, and as far as Azerbaijan on the Caspian Sea, and would not be warm – would be wearing a woolly sweater and a thick jacket – until I was in the middle of Turkmenistan, among praying Turkmen, mortifying themselves and performing the dusty ritual of waterless ablutions, called tayammum, also on a train, but a dirty and loudly clattering one, in the Karakum Desert, where it never rained.
From the Hardcover edition.