Nasty Thoughts on Nice Places

...I wouldn't call them radical,' I said...

...And everything that happened in the world?that was Buddhism, too...

...But she was still talking...

...Borges, to be sure, is a kindred spirit who also detests Latin America...

...I'm into Zen.' "Oh, Christ, I thought...

...Theroux is whetting our anticipation for earthier, at least more realistic, types south of the border...

...Paul Theroux' The Old Patagonian Express is addressed to none of the above...

...in fact, it is a generally pointless work...

...Fair enough...

...and refers just once to the Cuna Indians of the San Bias Archipelago, whose embroidered blouses surpass in inventiveness even those of the Guatemalan highland Indians, as "derelict" makers of "pokerwork junk...

...He has a novelist's eye for idiosyncratic characters picked up along the way, and a novelist's ear for dialogue...

...It's just crooked.' "'That's what everyone says, but they're wrong...

...Marx is a kind of Buddhist.' "Was she pulling my leg...

...The country, occupying half the continent, has an authoritarian government, as do all except two of the countries south of the Rio Grande...

...My diet, my bowels, my self-It's the way Right-wing people talk...

...1 held my breath as the writer approached Ayacucho by way of Huancayo...

...The funny thing about being smug and egocentric and thinking about health and purity all the time is that it can turn you into a fascist...

...And 1 don't write about it," one accepts that as part of the Borgean personality...

...But Borges is sni generis...

...Before he arrives in El Salvador, Theroux has knocked off all six countries: "a volcanic fissure each year threatens to shift in the tremendous way it has been promising and swallow them and their wran-glings...

...Huxley is quoted again, putting down Guatemala, yet is himself put down this time for his "senile transcendentalism...

...so we put up with pages and pages of dialogue involving fellow-travelers even crazier and more rootless than Wendy as the train meanders through the wastelands of Oklahoma and Texas on its way to Laredo...

...Predictably, Theroux likes the white middle-class Costa Rica and dislikes the black coastal area of that most un-Latin of Latin countries...

...Like everything you did-It was Buddhism...

...Theroux makes his plaintive exit through Zacapa, "thinking of what the lady in the hotel had said to me: Don't go to Zacapa...

...With its African sensuality, its folk-religions, its innovative poets, sculptors, painters, and musicians, its cities that run the gamut from colonial Salvador to supermodern Brasilia, its luxurious beaches, its steaming jungles and waterfalls, its festivals and favelas, Brazil is a country where Theroux' world-weary pessimism would be greeted with derision...

...The border towns are sleazy and the U.S...

...Instead, he quotes Aldous Huxley's philistine dismissal of Mexico's mural art, adding his own anachronistic snobbism: "From the wall art I saw in Mexico, I concluded that the painters had drawn much of their inspiration from Gulley Jimson...

...Johnson, whose biography Theroux is reading to stifle his boredom, rates 26...

...Besides, there is more to Mexico than this-although Theroux does not seem to know it...

...He delivers his quirky opinions on art, politics, race, religion, and sex with so much wit that he half-persuades his audience of his wisdom...

...Or for those incurable romantics who love the exotic, the picturesque and the beautiful wherever they are to be found...

...is partly responsible because we don't require migrant farm labor to have passports, and because our "drug culture" is the world's biggest consumer of the deadly stuff...

...But if 1 had not come here, I would not have known the extent of this desolation...

...He does not mention the fateful meeting between Bolivar and San Martin in that city or, up the hill in Quito, the equally fateful albeit more romantic encounter between the Liberator and his mistress, Manuela Saenz, who carried the first torch for liberated womanhood...

...That's not Buddhism...

...It is the smell of lawlessness . . ."-of wetbacks, derelicts, drug pushers, thieves, gamblers, tarts...

...His anglophilic literary taste makes him prefer-or profess to prefer, for he delights in teasing his listeners-kipling to Cesar Vallejo, Longfellow to Pablo Neruda, Chesterton to Octavio Paz...

...Ecuador...

...The feat of evading Brazil-all of it -Is accomplished even more easily...

...What do you study, Wendy?' '"Eastern philosophy...

...All of the best of that nation lies to the south and west-monterrey, Guanajuato, Cuetzalen, Puebla, the Yucatan Peninsula, Oaxaca, Cuernavaca, Guadalajara, San Cristobal de las Ca-sas...

...Okay...

...1 have never felt it...

...hates the beleaguered "Zonians" of Panama...

...Yet before attempting to explain why this negative report on our closest neighbors has become one of the most widely acclaimed travel books in years, let us concede the author's virtues and accompany him on his itinerary...

...For the intellectual who feels short-changed by standard guides and seeks an in-depth treatment...

...The next thing you know you'll be raving about the purity of the race.'" Fair enough again...

...Central America...

...For the self-satisfied patriot who enjoys a good laugh at the expense of benighted foreigners and their mismanaged nations...

...For a writer whose stock in trade is to laugh at people, not with them-and with the head rather than the heart-the decision to end his trip in the empty wasteland of Argentina's Patagonia is a sound one...

...He begins by putting down his fellow-Americans on the first leg of his journey-boston, Massachusetts, to Laredo, Texas...

...Not politics,' I said...

...It's the opposite of thought-It's selfish, it's narrow, it's dishonest . . .' "'I know I have fairly radical views,' she said...

...So Theroux' chapter on the author becomes part of the Borges canon, and appearing toward the end it partly redeems what has otherwise been a very long and very dull journey...

...She would be in Ohio for a few more years...

...Well, he manages both feats handily by succumbing to (everybody's) soroche on the train over the pass, and then becoming so alarmed by tall tales of the bus ride south that he retreats back to hateful Lima...

...Even when he utters such a patent untruth as "I don't understand revenge...

...It is only two hundred yards, but the smell of Nuevo Laredo rises...

...His encounters are generally put-downs, but they are amusing...

...There is, for instance, Wendy, the raw-food faddist from Ohio who objects to smoking and drinking beer...

...In his entire journey, Theroux makes only one stop that lifts his spirit...

...In Guatemala he succeeds in finessing such delectable spots as Quetzaltenango, Momostenango, Atit-lan, Coban, Antigua and Quirigtia...

...I said, 'Marx was about as Buddhist as this beer can...

...On his way through Buenos Aires, he gives in to a temptation that every traveler from John Gunther to the author of this review could not resist: He talks with Jorge Luis Borges...

...They're smug views, self-important ones...

...Egocentric, you might say...

...But then the author crosses the border -and starts dashing our expectations...

...The thing about Buddhism, she said, was that it involved your whole life...

...Ruben Dario, regarded by every Spanish-American poet I've talked to as the first modernist, if not the greatest...

...He also bypasses Mexico City, admittedly an overcrowded megalopolis like Los Angeles and New York, but containing masterpieces of architecture and painting...

...I've been reading Marx...

...But anyway, I thought we were talking about politics...

...Mexico...

...Surely it will be difficult, 1 thought, for him to pass through Huancayo without seeing those stunning "etched" gourdes that hang along every street, or through Ayacucho (where the Spanish finally were routed) without a glimpse of those kilns where craftsmen in ceramics still rival their pre-Columbian ancestors...

...Peru...

...Reviewed by Selden Rodman Author, "Mexican Journal," "The Brazil Traveler," "The Road to Panama" For whom is a travel book written...

...The dazzling beauty of Popayan is not mentioned, while a whole chapter is devoted to the drug traffic of Baranquilla...

...For the prospective visitor to the country or countries surveyed...

...Theroux writes of the rats and slums of Guayaquil, which have been described before...

...the buildings wince at you with fright lines), is ugliest in those streets where, just past the last toppling house, a blue volcano's cone bulges...

...Why, then, the popularity of The Old Patagonian Express...

...Still, these towns were sleazy long before wetbacks and drugs, and they are hardly more sleazy than our border towns across from Nuevo Laredo, Ciudad Juarez or Tijuana...

...The great painters Botero and Obregon, the great novelist-poets Jose Eustacio Rivera and Luis Carlos Lopez, do not rate a line...

...On the other hand, our discriminating traveler does manage to stop off in Vera Cruz and devote a chapter to the tropical port that even Mexicans regard as a hell-hole...

...There is no denying that Theroux writes well...

...Colombia...

...Cali is "so dull that simply to keep myself occupied one afternoon, I bought a roll of dental floss and carefully flossed my teeth...

...He passes through Nicaragua without stopping, though not before taking a swipe at a country that "in two hundred years of literacy has produced one writer-a mediocre poet...

...The reason, I think, is that we have become too cynical, too filled with self-loathing, to want to be enriched by anything creative and different in the cultures of others...

...He is establishing, the reader thinks, his credentials for a more generous acceptance of Latin Americans lacking the smugness that accompanies affluence...

...Unable to skip Guatemala City, he is nevertheless repulsed by that beautiful place: "Its ugliness, which is a threatened look (the low morose houses have earthquake cracks in their facades...

...The author manages to avoid such centers of culture and art...

...His style is lively...

...For the "armchair traveler"-the person with no intention of going anywhere but curious to know what other lands are like...