Theroux is reflexively critical if anything, which is why he has the distinction of being one of the most insightful – yet dyspeptic – travel writers out there. Theroux feels like “a wraith from the past, knocking on broken windows with my bony fingers, pressing my skull against the glass and looking death’s-head toothy, and saying, Remember me?” At times like this, Dark Star Safari reads like a man looking up an old friend after years of absence, and decrying, “I managed to keep myself in shape! How could you have let yourself go like this?” Unfortunately, what he discovers upon his return bears a disheartening contrast to the place of his youth. Thus, when the author returns to visit his old school, he returns in anticipation of a happy reunion with the place he associates with his youthful aspirations. It was during that period that the author “got a glimpse of the pattern my life would take” to Theroux “Africa, “for all its perils, represented wilderness and possibility.” As a young man serving in the Peace Corps during the early 1960s, Theroux worked in Malawi as a teacher. This in mind, the reader of Dark Star Safari should brace himself like Theroux does: for moments of happiness along with all the expectations of misery, encountering the picturesque while expecting the appalling.ĭark Star Safari is in great part Theroux’s own story of his relationship with Africa.
The other form of travel-the form through which Theroux traverses Africa-reminds us that “travel is transition.” It’s the type of travel that requires “going slowly, crossing national frontiers, scuttling past razor wire with my bag and passport,” the whole time “being reminded that there was a relationship between Here and There, and that a travel narrative was the story of There and Back.”
In one form, a person can be transported from the familiar to the foreign quickly, and in relatively comfortable fashion. My father was kind of a jokester, but he tended to make jokes in funny voices the way, sometimes, people do.Paul Theroux’s most recent travel narrative, Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town (Houghton Mifflin, 2003) is a vivid reminder that there are two types of travel. The story is not completely autobiographical, but I did base it on the fact that my father was in a minstrel show. In the 1950s, there were such things as minstrel shows in suburban Boston. Bones," about a father who turns himself into a minstrel act A short story is often the fantasy of a writer, as well as the experience of a writer.
I think of my writing, generally, as being about the odd man out or the odd woman out, so it's maybe extraordinary people, but maybe also fantasies that I have. It could be a person thinking that they met "Miss Right" and turning out that they made a horribly wrong decision.
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