By Train Through the Americas
I came across The Old Patagonian Express while perusing the book shelves of the Cottage Book Shop in Glen Arbor, Michigan--one of my favorite book stores I've ever visited, and I now make the trip at least once a year. The book was a used copy, marked for seven dollars with a simple cover. After reading the back cover synopsis, I couldn't put it down. I spent most of the year reading fiction and classic novels, so it was a refreshing experience to read something biographical in between Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen, some Nicholas Sparks novels, and a book on gardening.
The American novelist, Paul Theroux, is widely known for his novels such as The Great Railway Bazaar, Riding the Iron Rooster, and The Imperial Way, all of which are travel books about his adventures around the globe. By the time he wrote and published The Old Patagonian Express in 1979, he was no amateur at writing about his travels in a no-nonsense manner that carefully strayed away from painting his travels with rose-colored glasses, or exaggerating his experiences for melodrama
"Self-dramatization is inevitable in any travel book; most travelers, however dreary and plonkingly pedestrian, see themselves as solitary and rather heroic adventurers. But the odd thing is that the real heroes of travel seldom write about their journeys."
Boarding the morning train at his sleepy, snow-blown neighborhood station outside of Boston, Massachusetts, Theroux didn't get off the train with those leaving for work, briefcases in hand. Instead, he kept going, his goal: to see how he could travel by train all the way to the end of the Americas, to the dusty Wild-West like town of Esquel, Patagonia.
"I was seeking an adventure when I took the trip that became The Old Patagonian Express. I wanted to leave my front door in Medford, Massachusetts, and head for Patagonia, and to do so without leaving the ground. I wished to get, by degrees, from the cozy, homely place where I was born to the distant and outlandish--so I thought--area in the southern part of South America. I wanted to make a connection between the known and the unknown: to go as far as I could from home and yet still remain in the Western Hemisphere."
His novel is honest, at times even brutal about the places he visits and the people he encounters. He doesn't sugar-coat or exaggerate his experiences, and because of this desire to avoid enhancing his experiences for the page, at times, the novel was a bit a bore to get through. But upon finishing the book, I knew that Theroux's objective for honesty was accomplished. At times, his day-to-day travels from train station to train station were just plainly boring. Imagine sitting on a train for days that rolls across the flat desert with nothing to see but blue skies and dirt. How would one try to make that interesting? The fact that it was difficult to read at times attests to the concentration and care Theroux put into his novel to ensure he was being authentic to his actual experiences. I could feel from the pages of his book how maddeningly futile it seemed to him to be on this endeavor. He was often trapped during his travels in places throughout South America due to malfunctioning trains, civil unrest, rock slides, or floods. The idea of buying a plane ticket home was more than tempting when all he had to look forward to was the slight chance of someone selling stale matcha tea at the next train stop, or how he could wake at night to the sound of sand and grit crunching between his teeth from dust storms outside the train.
One of my favorite parts of the book was when he met the famous Jorge Luis Borges, the blind poet and writer of Argentina. In college, I read his short story collection, Everything and Nothing, and I loved his work, much his writing style influencing my own. So, I loved reading in The Old Patagonian Express of how star-struck Theroux was when he met with the blind writer, and how human Borges was, especially with his love for the classics by Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Edgar Allen Poe. Throughout the days of Theroux's visit in Buenos Aires, he would meet with Borges at his apartment for an evening of perusing Borges' immense collection of books, reading the classics out loud to the man, and concluding the evening by walking to a nearby restaurant for dinner. During these visits, they would discuss anything other than Borges' own work, who seemed to detest speaking of it.
I don't wish to give away much of the adventures Paul Theroux had throughout the Americas, so I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys reading about traveling, especially the gritty kind of travel where 5 star hotels are avoided, the food is bizarre and authentic, and the encounters with people make the trip, and book, memorable.
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