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Figures In A Landscape: People and Places Kindle Edition
"Theroux is at the top of his game with his third collection of essays, a magisterial grouping of intimate remembrances, globe-trotting adventures, and incisive literary critiques."—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
"Theroux's observations are so keen and writerly skills so sharp that he butter-slices narratives with a razor-thin surgeon's scalpel, masterfully serving up both the world's dark underbelly and its gloriously uplifting sustenance of love, longing and wonder-lust." —Forbes
Paul Theroux’s latest collection of essays applies his signature searching curiosity to a life lived as much in reading as on the road. This writerly tour-de-force features a satisfyingly varied selection of topics. Travel essays take us to Ecuador, Zimbabwe, and Hawaii, to name a few. Gems of literary criticism reveal fascinating depth in the work of Henry David Thoreau, Muriel Spark, Joseph Conrad, and Hunter Thompson. And in a series of breathtakingly personal profiles, we take a helicopter ride with Elizabeth Taylor, go diagnosing with Oliver Sacks, eavesdrop on the day-to-day life of a Manhattan dominatrix, and explore New York with Robin Williams.
An extended meditation on the craft of writing binds together this wide-ranging collection, along with Theroux’s constant quest for the authentic in a person or in a place.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherMariner Books
- Publication dateMay 8, 2018
- File size4797 KB
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"A portrait of an optimist with curiosity and affection for humanity in all its forms, as well as a ravenous appetite for the literary efforts of others . . . Theroux’s sweet spot happens to be spinning a convincing narrative through wandering conversations with any citizens who cross his path . . . Emotionally affective." — New York Times Book Review "Novelist and travel writer Theroux is at the top of his game with his third collection of essays, a magisterial grouping of intimate remembrances, globe-trotting adventures, and incisive literary critiques . . . A highly versatile, appealing writer, Theroux casts a wide net with pleasing and entertaining results." — Publishers Weekly, starred review “[Theroux’s] stories are less travelogues than well-curated meditations on some of the places, people, and moments he has experienced in a lifetime of rambles . . . His spare, unhurried prose style, which is rarely long-winded, betrays a novelist's relish for illuminating details and devastating turns of phrase . . . A masterfully simple and satisfying collection.” — Kirkus Reviews "Those who’ve missed these thirty pieces where previously published will be impressed by the breadth of his interests, the depth of his research, and the scrupulousness of his prose. A profile of Elizabeth Taylor . . . works a miracle, allowing us to view the icon with unjaded eyes. A lengthy profile of a dominatrix . . . offers genuine insight into both spanker and spanked. Appreciations of Conrad, Greene, Maugham, and Simenon show how book introductions ought to be done. And the closing, more personal pieces . . . add emotional heft and shape to this wide-ranging, thought-provoking, and eminently browsable collection." — Booklist "Theroux's observations are so keen and writerly skills so sharp that he butter-slices narratives with a razor-thin surgeon's scalpel, masterfully serving up both the world's dark underbelly and its gloriously uplifting sustenance of love, longing and wonder-lust." — Forbes "In short, there is something for everyone . . . His talky, big-hearted book will make a heavenly companion at the beach." — Honolulu Star-Advertiser "His new collection of essays, like its illustrious author, is full of surprises."— Forbes.com —
About the Author
PAUL THEROUX is the author of many highly acclaimed books. His novels include The Bad Angel Brothers, The Lower River, Jungle Lovers, and The Mosquito Coast, and his renowned travel books include Ghost Train to the Eastern Star and Dark Star Safari. He lives in Hawaii and on Cape Cod.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
My Drug Tour: Searching for Ayahuasca
When I first read The Yage Letters, William Burroughs’s cackling account of his drug search in Peru and down Colombia’s Río Putumayo to find what he referred to in Junky as the grail of psychotropics (“Yage may be the final fix”)—a trip in which he was rolled, robbed, starved, diverted, and endlessly bullshitted in his quest to find a high that towered way beyond your average stoner’s dreams of doobage—I closed the book and thought: I really must repeat his trip sometime.
This was in the 1960s, when the book first appeared, to cries of execration by the usual hypocrites. The book is an encouragement to any prospective quester, and very funny, too. “In all my experience as a homosexual I have never been the victim of such idiotic pilfering,” he writes of a flirtation with a boy in Peru, then quickly adds, “Trouble is I share with the late Father Flanagan—he of Boys Town?—?the deep conviction that there is no such thing as a bad boy.”
Yage is yajé, Banisteriopsis caapi: vine of the soul, secret nectar of the Amazon, the shaman’s holy drink, the ultimate poison, a miracle cure. More generally known as ayahuasca, a word I found bewitching, it was said to make its users prescient if not telepathic. Rocket fuel is another active ingredient: in an ayahuasca trance, many users have testified, you travel to distant planets, you meet extraterrestrials and moon goddesses. “Yage is space time travel,” Burroughs said. A singular proof of this is the collection of trance-state paintings by one of ayahuasca’s greatest proponents, the shaman and vegetalista Don Pablo Amaringo. Ayahuasca Visions, Don Pablo’s book (written with Luis Eduardo Luna), is a meticulous pictorial record of his many ayahuasca sessions. But there are risks in the drug, too, not least of which are convulsive fits and ghastly spells of vomiting. Many of Don Pablo’s paintings include an image of someone engaged in picturesque puking.
Even my closest friends have seldom succeeded in exerting a malign influence on me: I am by nature pitch-averse, resistant to the selling mechanism. A persuasive sales pitch is no pitch at all, but rather something like a tremor that causes in me a distinct throb of aversion. Praise a product or a person to me, boost something or someone in my estimation, urge me to care deeply about a cause or a campaign, and my shit detector emits a high-pitched negative squeal that blorts in my head and sends me in the opposite direction.
Yet for all my circumspection, I have been seriously led astray by books. Reading about Africa made me want to go there; I spent six years in Malawi and Uganda in the 1960s, enthralled. Under the spell of Conrad I went to Singapore, not for a visit but for three years on that tyrannized and humid island of sullen overachievers ?— ?though my lengthy sojourn was relieved by trips to north Borneo, upper Burma, and Indonesia. Books led me to Africa, to India, to Patagonia, to the ends of the earth. I travel to find obstacles, to discover my limits, to ease the passage of time, to reassure myself that innocence and antiquity exist, to search for links to the past, to flee from the nastiness of urban life and the paranoia, if not outright dementia, of the technological world. The Yage Letters possessed me. Burroughs had written simply: “I decided to go down to Colombia and score for yage.”
Years passed. Then I was in the middle of a novel and stuck for an idea, and in this period of Work in Stoppage I remembered “The Aleph,” the great story of visions by Borges, in which a man finds the inch-wide stone, the Aleph, that allows him to see to the heart of himself and the world. I realized the moment had arrived for me to find the insight and telepathy of ayahuasca, which would be my Aleph.
Some friends, former amigos of the old gringo and self-exiled writer Moritz Thomsen, told me they knew of ayahuasqueros among the river people in eastern Ecuador. I was given the name of an outfit that shepherded aliens into the tributaries of the upper Amazon where traditional healers abounded. I made arrangements and soon found myself in a cheap hotel in Quito, awaiting the arrival of the other travelers on this drug tour.
“Drug tour” was my name for it. “Ethnobotanical experience” was the prettified official name for it, and some others spoke of it as a quest, a chance to visit a colorful Indian village, a clearing in the selvage tropical where, just a few decades before, American missionaries sought early martyrdoms among the blowguns and poison-tipped arrows of indignant animists resisting forcible conversion to Christianity.
The people who organized this drug junket characterized it as a high-minded field trip, eight days in the rainforest, for eco-awareness and spiritual solidarity, to learn the names and uses of beneficial plants. One of those plants was ayahuasca. There was no promise of a ritual, yet heavy hints were dropped about a “healing.” We would be living in a traditional village of indigenous Secoya people, deep in Ecuador’s Oriente region, near the Colombian border, on a narrow branch of Burroughs’s Putumayo, where the ayahuasca vine clinging to the trunks of rainforest trees grows as thick as a baby’s arm.
But I had a bad feeling from the beginning. I am not used to traveling in groups, and this was a nervous and ill-assorted bunch, eight or ten people, a larger number than I had expected. The great attraction for me?—?it was the reason I had signed up—?was that Don Pablo Amaringo would be our vegetalista. But even Don Pablo, in his stirring lecture in Quito before we set out, spoke of the conflicting vibrations he felt among the people in our group.
Don Pablo’s gentle manner, shy Amazonian smile, and wide knowledge of jungle plants made him instantly persuasive. He was golden-skinned and slight of build, and his expressions were so animated and responsive it was impossible to tell his age. An experienced taker of ayahuasca, he had as a master painter been able to capture the experience in his pictures. He is a respected shaman, though he seldom used the word. “Shaman” is a term from the Siberian Evenki people that has gained wide acceptance. In Quechua, the word for shaman is pajé, “the man who embodies all experience.”
Don Pablo was also a teacher; he ran an art school in Pucallpa, Peru. In 1953 Burroughs had found ayahuasca in Pucallapa. I trusted Don Pablo from the moment I met him. He remains one of the most gifted, insightful, and charismatic people I have met in my life. Don Pablo correctly diagnosed that I had unfinished business back home?—my wife unwell, my affairs in a muddle; he seemed to know I was stuck in writing my book. His shrewdness reminded me that a substance named telepathine had been isolated from ayahuasca.
“Your mind is partly here and partly at home,” he told me.
The others disturbed me. Except for a psychiatrist-poet and a young man who was on the trip to add a chapter to his book about his drug experiences (not long before, he had been roistering at the Burning Man festival), these people were not travelers. Even in Quito they looked out of their depth, and later, as we penetrated the Ecuadorian interior, they seemed to wilt. One woman cried easily, one man proclaimed militant Judaism, another her spirit search; a man confided to me that he was on a quest for spiritual fulfillment, another sobbed, “I need a healing.” One lovely girl was beset by a chronic case of the squitters.
They thought of themselves as searchers. They seemed to have a touching faith in the efficacy of this trip, yet they seemed abysmally ill prepared for its rigors. The sobbing woman did not bother me much; I was more concerned by the anxious screeching facetiousness of some of the others. They seemed to me innocents. They were easily spooked, yet looking to repair their lives. Most had never been in a jungle before, or slept rough.
Product details
- ASIN : B07742B1VP
- Publisher : Mariner Books; Reprint edition (May 8, 2018)
- Publication date : May 8, 2018
- Language : English
- File size : 4797 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 415 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #666,959 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #117 in Pacific Islanders Biographies
- #913 in Travel Writing
- #955 in Essays (Kindle Store)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Paul Theroux was born and educated in the United States. After graduating from university in 1963, he travelled first to Italy and then to Africa, where he worked as a Peace Corps teacher at a bush school in Malawi, and as a lecturer at Makerere University in Uganda. In 1968 he joined the University of Singapore and taught in the Department of English for three years. Throughout this time he was publishing short stories and journalism, and wrote a number of novels. Among these were Fong and the Indians, Girls at Play and Jungle Lovers, all of which appear in one volume, On the Edge of the Great Rift (Penguin, 1996).
In the early 1970s Paul Theroux moved with his wife and two children to Dorset, where he wrote Saint Jack, and then on to London. He was a resident in Britain for a total of seventeen years. In this time he wrote a dozen volumes of highly praised fiction and a number of successful travel books, from which a selection of writings were taken to compile his book Travelling the World (Penguin, 1992). Paul Theroux has now returned to the United States, but he continues to travel widely.
Paul Theroux's many books include Picture Palace, which won the 1978 Whitbread Literary Award; The Mosquito Coast, which was the 1981 Yorkshire Post Novel of the Year and joint winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was also made into a feature film; Riding the Iron Rooster, which won the 1988 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award; The Pillars of Hercules, shortlisted for the 1996 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award; My Other Life: A Novel, Kowloon Tong, Sir Vidia's Shadow, Fresh-air Fiend and Hotel Honolulu. Blindness is his latest novel. Most of his books are published by Penguin.
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1. I had been in the middle of an interesting but boring book. The topic was very much of my interest, but the way it was written bored me. So I decided to give myself a break by reading another book. The original plan was to read one essay from this book, go back to previous book, return to another essay, go back to previous book, and so forth. The format of this book seemed just ideal.
2. Several years ago I already read two of Paul Theroux's works and I enjoyed every page.
3. This book was listed among "Great on Kindle" and thus earned me a credit of $1. In times like now, a dollar means dear.
Of Reason Number One:
Instead of finding a book that doesn't require much digestion, that can be read while sipping coffee, that would replace my boredom from previous book with a cheerful mood, I found myself sitting upright trying to digest paragraph by paragraph. One essay finished, I sighed and said to myself: "Oh, so that's it?" I glanced at the flying five, four stars, this title has earned and then look at myself. To accept the fact that my mind is this dumb, is yet another thing to digest. Therefore instead of returning to previous book, I proceeded to another essay -- merely to proof to myself I have the brain to digest Theroux.
Of Reason Number Two:
The two previous titles of Paul Theroux had been fun, entertaining. This time, I find it the total opposite. Is it just me getting old? That's another fact difficult to digest.
Of Reason Number Three:
I have converted to a digital reader just recently after this crazy pandemic infecting currency so bad. Consequently, it's my first time purchasing an e-book listed on "Great on Kindle". Honestly speaking, I'm now wary of the "great stuffs on Kindle". Maybe I had been credited an extra dollar, because Amazon understands I will need a new digesting system.
Exactly as how I have been proceeding from one essay to another in this book, I'm looking forward to another title of Paul Theroux. Had this title been a success? In a sense, yes.