Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: 28,000 Miles in Search of the Railway Bazaar

by Paul Theroux

book data

163 ratings, 3.96 average rating, 59 reviews (more data...)

rating	frequency	%
5		27%
4		45%
3		23%
2		3%
1		0%

edit

published

August 18th 2008 by Houghton Mifflin

binding

Hardcover, 464 pages

isbn

0618418873 (isbn13: 9780618418879)

description

Thirty years after his classic The Great Railway Bazaar, Paul Theroux revisits Eastern Europe, Central Asia, India, China, Japan, and Siberia.

Half a l...more

find at: Amazon | Half.com | Barnes & Noble | Abebooks | compare prices…

new topic
discuss this book

There are no discussion topics on this book yet. Be the first to start one »

friend reviews

To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.

lists with this book

This book is currently not featured on any Listopia lists. Add this book to your favorite list »

other reviews (showing 1-20 of 360)

sort: default (?) | date
filters: all | text-only

12/20/08

Stephanie rated it:

(review of isbn 0771085338)

Read in August, 2008

IT is said that travel broadens the horizons; but what to make of pounding the same paths again? In his latest book, American author Paul Theroux retraces the journey through Asia which he took back in 1973 and described in The Great Railway Bazaar (1975), the bestseller which established him as a travel writer.
Travelling mostly by train from London through Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia, Japan and Russia, the Asia he sees on his second trip is a globalised one in wh...more IT is said that travel broadens the horizons; but what to make of pounding the same paths again? In his latest book, American author Paul Theroux retraces the journey through Asia which he took back in 1973 and described in The Great Railway Bazaar (1975), the bestseller which established him as a travel writer.
Travelling mostly by train from London through Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia, Japan and Russia, the Asia he sees on his second trip is a globalised one in which most societies are keenly aware that there are other, perhaps better, ways of living: “The places I had known... these homebodies whose horizon was their national frontier, had all (it seemed to me) become soured and discontented... It was now a world of travelers, or people dreaming of a life elsewhere – far away.”
Singaporean readers will by turns be angry and amused by his unflattering portrayal of Singapore, one of his stops. Besides the expected criticisms of the chewing gum ban, caning, and the death penalty for drug possession, it also includes his rather dismissive caricature of a people: “Punishment for not toeing the government’s line was always on the Singaporean’s mind. It shows in the Singaporean face, typically an anxious face – pouting kittenish women, frowning nerdish men.”
To his credit, Theroux doesn’t deny that he has a bone to pick with this place: from 1968 to 1971, he taught English literature at the then-University of Singapore, but his contract was not renewed, an act tantamount to a firing.
On the bright side, he does toss out a few grudging, if somewhat inaccurate, compliments: “No one was fat. No one was poor. No one was badly dressed.” The first statement is fairly true, the second obviously not, and the last will certainly come as news to a nation fond of flip-flops and bermudas.
And of course, he bluntly states certain harsh but undeniable truths. Indeed, the reward of reading a travelogue is hearing the honest, if biased, observations about a society by a perceptive visitor, a more personal and heartfelt opinion than that offered by a standard travel guide.
Oddly, despite the fact that he told newspapers during his visit here that Singapore was his last stop before going home, in this travelogue he makes it seem as if his trip continues seamlessly on from here to Cambodia, Vietnam, Japan and Russia, before heading back to England.
But certain liberties with regard to space, time and even experience are not unusual in this genre. As the author writes preemptively and self-deprecatingly at the start of the book: “Most writing about travel takes the form of jumping to conclusions, and so most travel books are superfluous, the thinnest, most transparent monologuing...dishonest complaining, creative mendacity, pointless heroics, and chronic posturing, much of it distorted with Munchansen syndrome.”
Though Theroux would probably balk at being considered a representative American, much of his narrative is tinted with his consciousness of being a citizen of the United States, both a promised land and a global bully. He rather touchingly, if somewhat provincially, repeatedly expresses surprise when people from Turkey to Vietnam don’t hold it against him for being American.
As in Gulliver’s Travels, each country the author visits seems to reflect a certain aspect of human nature and of his own society. In Bangalore, India, young educated Indians are given American names, trained to speak with American accents, and then spend their time cold-calling people in the United States for their American clients.
And the water-torture device on display at Tuol Sleng, the Pol Pot regime torture prison in Cambodia, reminds him of the Bush administration’s “enhaced interrogation techniques” used on suspected terrorists: “The traveller’s conceit is that barbarism is something singular and foreign, to be encountered halfway around the world in some pinched and parochial backwater... And then, to his shame, he realises that they are identical to the ones advocated and dilgently applied by his own government.”
A travelogue isn’t simply a vicarious means to tour the world from the comfort of home. Whether or not you buy the author’s scathing criticisms and earnest praise, his vivid renderings of places and people inspire and provoke, making you wonder what version of the world you would see if you too, hopped on a train to somewhere else.(less)

Like this review? yes (1 person liked it)

add a comment

01/21/09

Bob rated it:

(review of isbn 0771085338)

Read in October, 2008

recommends it for: anyone who wants to write about travel

Dang, there was an awesome quote toward the end of this massive travelogue, where the author addresses the reader directly, congratulating him or her on reading long past the point of comfort and common sense. Only the truly dedicated reader, writer, or traveler will love this book
and if it hadn't been overdue at the library, I would transcribe it here.

Endurance itself is one of the innumerable topics Theroux goes on about for months and miles through evocative and lively descr...more

Like this review? yes (1 person liked it)

add a comment

08/03/08

Michael rated it:

(review of isbn 0771085338)

Read in October, 2008

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

Like this review? yes (1 person liked it)

add a comment

02/05/09

Bookmarks Magazine added it

Paul Theroux has polarized critics with his latest travelogue. His sense of adventure, candid descriptions, and evocative prose notwithstanding, some critics took issue with the unbridled narcissism suffusing the narrative. Others lavished praise on the best-selling author, and the Los Angeles Times, summarizing the two sides neatly, called Theroux "a compelling writer who is essentially unlikable." Despite this opinion and complaints of unimaginative generalizations and a tendency tow

...more

Like this review? yes

add a comment

01/19/09

James rated it:

(review of isbn 0771085338)

Read in January, 2009

A retracing Theroux's 1973 overland loop of the entire Eurasian continent in the classic The Great Railway Bazaar, Ghost Train feels completely different than it's predecessor. When I think of The Great Railway Bazaar, I think of cringe-inducing misanthropy and the occasional polite interaction with another human being. In Theroux's subsequent travel writing, it's easy to detect an evolution as he becomes more empathetic and patient in the way he chooses to write about his travels. Ghost Trai...more

Like this review? yes

add a comment

06/19/09

Bill rated it:

(review of isbn 0771085338)

Read in June, 2009

Thirty years ago Theroux took the Orient Express and many other trains from London to the Far East and returned. That trip was captured in The Great Railway Bazaar, which made his reputation. Now he is repeating the trip and recording his experiences in the Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

Theroux travels alone, he considers himself to be a ghost. Like ghosts he is revisiting his past life and also like ghosts he is not noticed. He says,

"Travel can induce such a d...more

Like this review? yes

add a comment

04/30/09

Raghu rated it:

(review of isbn 0771085338)

Read in April, 2009

This book is an account of Paul Theroux's repeat of his journey 33 years before which resulted in his writing the classic 'The Great Railway Bazaar'. Now in his sixties, Theroux undertakes the same journey again to look at what has changed and what has not. Well, there are slight variations in his route because of the crisis in Afghanistan and because of Iran refusing him a visa. So, from Turkey, he goes through Georgia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan to get to India this time around. T...more This book is an account of Paul Theroux's repeat of his journey 33 years before which resulted in his writing the classic 'The Great Railway Bazaar'. Now in his sixties, Theroux undertakes the same journey again to look at what has changed and what has not. Well, there are slight variations in his route because of the crisis in Afghanistan and because of Iran refusing him a visa. So, from Turkey, he goes through Georgia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan to get to India this time around. The book is engagingly written as always and it makes good fast pace even though one may not agree with all views expressed therein.
From Paris to Turkey, the journey is uneventful. His chronicles of Georgia and Azerbaijan present a somewhat bleak picture of the countries. Theroux describes at length with good humor and derision the culture of Stalinist self-promotion in Turkmenistan by its leader Niyazov. It is clear that independence has not done away with Stalinist practices in Turmenistan. He goes to Tashkent in Uzbekistan from where he flies to Amritsar in India.
The narrative gets more lively once he starts his travels in India. He travels from Amritsar in Punjab all the way down south by trains. However, Theroux is not impressed by all the hype about the new India. He still sees rampant poverty as it was 33 years before. He observes that there is hope and optimism amongst Indians now and that they look to the future rather than the past as they used to. Theroux also remarks that poor Indians always so extremely hard for so little and that they are never lazy. This contrasts interestingly with middle-class Indians constantly berating the poor for being lazy!
He spends a brief time in Sri Lanka which he seems to enjoy. Then it is Myanmar where he reports that the conditions are as awful as they were three decades ago. Theroux does something wonderful for an old rickshaw driver in Myanmar by giving him more than a thousand dollars so that he can buy his own rickshaw and look forward to some sort of a secure retirement. It is a very touching part of the narrative. He later comes across another American in Cambodia who does a similar thing to a poor Cambodian.
Theroux travels through Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Singapore and on to south Western China. He is a little pre-occupied with massage parlours and prostitution in Thailand. He is caustic about Singapore. He spends only a day in China saying that he does not want to listen to people constantly talking about making money, which is what China is for him. From China he goes to Japan. There is a delightful ten pages of conversation between him and his friend and traveller Pico Iyer in Nara, Japan. I found this one of the best parts of the book. However, Theroux is quite pre-occupied with the focus on sex in Japan. From Japan, he goes to Vladivostok and then gets back to London on the Trans-Siberian train.
Theroux laments the changes that have occurred in many parts of the world that he revisits. He would rather like them to be the way he saw them long ago. It is clear that he likes to travel in India, Sri Lanka and Thailand. He is not keen at all about Singapore, China and Myanmar.
Though the book does not have the freshness of the 'Great Railway Bazaar', for obvious reasons, it is an enjoyable read.
(less)

Like this review? yes

add a comment

04/27/09

Pat rated it:

(review of isbn 0771085338)

Read in April, 2009

I don't like any of Paul Theroux's novels, including The Mosquito Coast - too dark for my liking. However, I do like much of his travel writing. Still, some of his travel writing has been marred by his persona, which is as likely to come across as nasty and with a generally dyspeptic view of the people he meets and the places he goes. However, when his mood is better, I really enjoy his writing. This was one of his better books - a retracing of the Great Railway Bazaar trip which he took ove...more

Like this review? yes

add a comment

11/27/08

Dalebrayden rated it:

(review of isbn 0771085338)

bookshelves: adventure, nonfiction

Read in December, 2008

This is Theroux's attempt to retrace the route of his first travel book, The Great Railway Bazaar. In his earlier trip, in 1973, he traveled mostly by train from Europe, across southern Asia, to Viet Nam and beyond. He had been unable to travel to Laos and Cambodia because of the war - an omission that he repaired on his more recent journey. This time, however, he was not able to travel in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Iran, for obvious reasons.

I found the book fascinating. Theroux is not af...more

Like this review? yes

add a comment

01/26/09

Beth rated it:

(review of isbn 0771085338)

bookshelves: nonfiction

Read in March, 2009

This book is a sequel of sorts to the Great Railway Bazaar, which Paul Theroux wrote about 35 years ago about taking a series of trains from London to Japan. Now, he's repeated the trip to see what's changed.

After I graduated from college, Gerry & I went walkabout and traveled out of backpacks for about 6 months. We read this book on that trip, and although we did not follow Theroux's itinerary, we did take some of the same trains (such as from Singapore - Bangkok) and enjoyed compa...more

Like this review? yes

add a comment

03/09/09

Holly rated it:

(review of isbn 0771085338)

bookshelves: memoir-travel-logs

Read in March, 2009

This is a great book for arm chair travelers like myself. I felt like I was along for the ride as the author traveled across central and Eastern Europe and Asia, through many different countries; some I've never even heard of and would never dream of traveling. Yet I am fascinated to learn about such places. The author is repeating a trip from 33 year earlier, noting the changes in the places and himself. He travels alone, mostly by rail, meeting and interviewing the common folk who come in ...more

Like this review? yes

add a comment

04/04/09

Kate rated it:

(review of isbn 0771085338)

Read in April, 2009

Love reading dear curmudgeon Mr. Baw Thoroux, and this is his most melancholy journey yet ... the high point was when he gave his rickshaw driver money to support himself for several years...Very poignant. The gossip about V.S. Naipaul, whom Mr. Baw hates w/ a passion only the cruelly spurned can cling to so fiercely over many years, and talk of Jan Morris and other travel writers, was odd, mixed in as it was with visits to Kyoto's temples...a fine read overall, but left me feeling sad and ghost...more

Like this review? yes

add a comment

03/27/09

Jamie rated it:

(review of other edition)

bookshelves: adult, just-for-fun

Read in March, 2009

I listened to this and it was a long ass listen.

I enjoyed it more often than not, but what I think I missed was the act that I didn't get the sense of place that I might have wished. Especially since I'm obsessed with ex-Iron Curtain countries AND Southeast Asia. What I got instead were anecdotes, some more interesting that others, of course. But some items, such as the conversation with Haruki Murakami could have taken place anywhere, there was nothing specifically "Japanese"...more

Like this review? yes

add a comment

09/29/08

Erik rated it:

(review of isbn 0771085338)

I admit to having never read Theroux’s thirty-some-year-old classic The Great Train Bazaar, but I did eagerly devour his mid-90s circumnavigation of the Mediterranean coastline in The Pillars of Hercules. (Which, incidentally, was published shortly after my first Grand Tour of the Europe in the last half of 2004.) Yet I still managed to thoroughly savor every page of this retracing of his journey across Europe, Asia, and back.

Theroux begins his train-trip in London with a bit too ...more I admit to having never read Theroux’s thirty-some-year-old classic The Great Train Bazaar, but I did eagerly devour his mid-90s circumnavigation of the Mediterranean coastline in The Pillars of Hercules. (Which, incidentally, was published shortly after my first Grand Tour of the Europe in the last half of 2004.) Yet I still managed to thoroughly savor every page of this retracing of his journey across Europe, Asia, and back.

Theroux begins his train-trip in London with a bit too much heavy-handed wistfulness (at least for me) by arguing that “travel writing is the lowest form of self-indulgence: dishonest complaining, creative mendacity, pointless heroics, and chronic posturing, much of it distorted with Munchausen syndrome.” Not a very persuasive way to begin a near-five-hundred-page book, do you think? I tell you, he almost lost me there.

Fortunately, once he hits Paris for the first stage of his journey, and then onto the Orient Express to Istanbul via Vienna, Budapest, and Bucharest, Theroux hits his stride, and avoids much of the hedge-like nonsense he espoused in the first few pages. After leaving Istanbul, the last outpost of quasi-European-ness, his rail journey turns stranger and stranger – at least from my point of view with Western values and amenities. Curiosities and oddities that emerge include: the personality cult of Turkmenistan’s leader; the rising middle-class enclaves of Mumbai with its out-sourced jobs from the U.S. right next to the poverty and child prostitutes of the dingiest parts; the sadly beautiful Thais, Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians who live day-by-day with their grindingly slow and exploitative Capitalism (with prostitution run rampant, yet again); the rigidly severe and Big Brother-like illusion of order and prosperity of ultra-modern Singapore (just don’t dare question authority); a visit with Japan’s greatest living writer, Haruki Murakami; and the lingering gulag memories in today’s “Capitalist” Russia. (I put quotations around that as it’s more like 19th-century America with its robber barons than the on-again off-again government intervention more prominent since the Great Depression.)

By journey’s end, Theroux closes with another moment of old-age wistfulness: “Most people on earth are poor. Most places are blighted and nothing will stop the blight getting worse.” Thankfully, this glass-is-half-full and the world-is-doomed lamentation of his is short. (Less than one full page of this, and then the book ends.) Theroux may be growing weary with the world as time goes by, but his astuteness still astounds. Luckily, there are more than just a dozen of his travelogues that I can go back and read.
(less)

Like this review? yes

add a comment

09/26/08

Judy rated it:

(review of isbn 0771085338)

bookshelves: non-fiction

Travel is an exercise in change. You read about places, you ask around, you see pictures; but when you get there you find that things have changed: prices are higher, food tastes better then you expected, locals are meaner, "the river used to be much higher..."

In a lot of peoples' opinions, if you've done it "right"-- travel will change you too.

This book is a glimpse at Paul Theroux's observations and reflections 30+ years after The Great Railway Bazza...more

Like this review? yes

9 comments

09/16/08

Laura rated it:

(review of isbn 0771085338)

Read in April, 2009

I'm really enjoying this and the more I read, the more I would like to have a drink with the author. I love Paul Theroux's writing (enjoy his novels, too) and this book just makes me want to pack my backpack and wander off. I am particularly looking forward to the chapter on Singapore....even better, I can read this along with my other books at the moment - although its very well written, it's easy to pick up and put down, especially at the end of a long day..

----

yeah! i ...more

Like this review? yes

add a comment

10/31/08

Carolanne rated it:

(review of isbn 0771085338)

bookshelves: books-read-because-of-b, nonfiction, travel-adventure

recommends it for: Brandon/Judy

Brandon: don't read further- might be spoilers!

Oh Paul. Pompous, but a great story teller. This book only gets 4 stars because (yes I know he was re-tracing his steps) but he repeats him self to much "at this point in time, I was broke, depressed, missing my wife" WHICH WAS HIS FAULT- mr. christmas-came-and-went-and-I didnt-bother-to-call-home.
But that is kind of mean of me to say because I do really like Paul. and in this book he is so in love! its sweet.
Bu...more

Like this review? yes

add a comment

04/04/09

Ellen rated it:

(review of isbn 0771085338)

Read in April, 2009

I LOVED THIS BOOK. I loved Theroux's ruminations on humanity, aging, politics, commercial development and overpopulation. Contrary to several other reviewers, I found him totally likeable.
The writing is SO good. Lovely images and excellent vocabulary. I learned a few new words and looked up others I recognized, but never really could define. It's been a long time since I had the need for that enjoyable process.
The travel stories had me entranced well into the night for hours past my...more

Like this review? yes

add a comment

12/13/08

Mark rated it:

(review of isbn 0771085338)

Read in March, 2009

"Travel is the saddest of pleasures, the long-distance overland blues", Theroux states in the final paragraph. He does get a bit sentimental and melancholic on us as he relfects on a lifetime of travel during as he re-traces of his 1973 train journey from London to Tokyo and back (The Great Railway Bazaar). But he's as insightful and cranky as ever. I throughly enjoy his opinions and stories of the people he meets. I know instinctively that the places he loves I would love too, and ...more

Like this review? yes

add a comment

01/04/09

PeggyL rated it:

(review of isbn 0771085338)

Read in January, 2009

The Great Railway Bazaar is one of my favorite books of all times. I am really enjoying this "sequel". He has mellowed with age, haven't we all. His openness to whatever is going on is fascinating. I am especially interested in his chapters on Cambodia and VietNam. I too visited those countries many years ago before their world was sent up in flames.

Like this review? yes

add a comment