Traveling with Upturned Nose

...My revulsion was too personal, I thought...

...Reviewed by Selden Rodman Author, "South America of the Poets," "Tongues of Fallen Angels," "Artists in Tune with Their World" After reading Paul Theroux's book about traveling through Latin America, The Old Patagonian Express, upon its publication several years ago, I refrained from reviewing it...

...Moreover, he knows what he is doing and how damaging is the prescription...

...and in these regards Theroux never disappoints...

...it just had that dirty desecrated look that I thought of as English...

...They stood in their bathing suits...

...But no, he does worse...

...If I had not come here," hedeclared, "I would not have known the extent of this desolation...

...It seemed hugely inappropriate that people were ironing antimacassars in a spot where a nuclear melt-down might be occurring...

...his insight into the Argentines who think of themselves as "stuck at the bottom of the world and surrounded by savages...

...Consider: "The English made no concessions at all to other nationalities...

...being] tolerant in the sense that they were willing to turn a blind eye to almost anything that might embarrass them...

...Like many other places I had seen in Britain, it looked much worse that it was...

...When he comes within four miles of Laughame, where Dylan Thomas found the inspiration for some of his loveliest poems and stories, he doesn't look...

...Surely, I said to myself, Theroux, the admirer of Dr...

...A headland looked like a dog crouching with his snout in a puddle...

...The little creatures hippity-hopped all over the bluff, and they were in the process of destroying one of the most beautiful cliffs on the coast--the bunnies had just about brought it down...

...It was hard in England to distinguish hotels from prisons or hospitals--most of them were run with the same indifference or cruelty, and were equally uncomfortable...

...Is this why posh book review and travel editors find his elegant ennui so irresistible...

...I had made the same transit (in Mexican Journal, The Road to Panama and South America of the Poets) from Texas to Tierra del Fuego, and the only thing we both seemed to enjoy was talking with Jorge Luis Borges in Buenos Aires...

...Naipaul and Graham Greene before him, is no revolutionary...

...They were huts, and chalet was mispronounced to suit them: 'shally,' the English said, an appropriate word made out of shanty and alley...

...The roads from Dumfries to Kilmarnock, past Ayr, around the north country from Inverness, and down to Edinburgh are scuffed off as though the genius of Robert Burns had never touched them...

...So much worse, in fact, that I returned to The Old Patagonian Express for a second reading, finding in it neglected plums: the description of a typical soccer match which anticipated the violence soon to come to El Salvador...

...Only a revolutionary could find grist in these gray mills that are Theroux's travel books...

...I had been looking for what was uniquely beautiful and exalted in these neglected countries...

...To see a country's poverty," he writes in an unguarded moment, "is not to see into its heart...

...It was not vicious...

...In The Kingdom By the Seat Theroux manages to walk all the way around Great Britain--including an excursion to the horrors of Belfast in Northern Ireland--without seeing anything he likes or any British who are admirable...

...His method of achieving this miracle of snobbism is again to take a route guaranteed to exhibit the worst: When this threatens to bisect something noble like a medieval castle or a cloistered church, he bypasses it...

...I've been here longer than you, a very English way of putting down a strange....On the British coast, whenever I was in a lonely place, I looked down and expected to see a dead man...

...Hove, like many other places on the English coast, had chalets...

...It looked somber enough to be an English recreation: The possibility of the ultimate fright, an experience of nothingness...

...He dismissed Ruben Dario of Nicaragua as a "mediocre poet" and referred not once to the continent's greatest, Cesar Vallejo and Pablo Neruda...

...he is a connoisseur of sleaziness, forever complaining of his boredom in the bargain-basements of kitsch...

...This was England, after all....Secretive, rose-growing, dog-loving, window-washing, grumpy, library-using, tea-drinking, fussy, and inflexible England...

...He congratulated himself "on having found this little-known route through Central America" where he could grouse about the danger of cholera...

...Leisure had been overtaken by fatigue and dull wittedness....The British industrial smells of foot rot, dead mice, and old socks...

...In Mexico he sneered at the murals, as Huxley and Lawrence had before him, without even seeing them...

...But Theroux, like V.S...

...Johnson and the Anglophilic Borges, will do better by Britain...

...Their skin was the veiny white of raw sausage casings...

...When the circuit of Britain's decaying ports and bathing resorts impinges on one of the glories of the world's richest literature, he skips it...

...In the political and moral vacuum that prevails, any touch of idealism, any response to nobility in the past, any hope for the future, is suspect...

...To eavesdrop on middle-aged Englishmen was often to hear them commenting on their lack of sexual drive....Borges had said about their Falklands War, 'It is like two bald men fighting over a comb...

...Wing Commander Wraggett said 'We've got to learn to tighten our belts.' His 'we' meant everyone else, of course...

...The commonest nighttime sound in the English coastal village, apart from the endlessly grieving surf, was that of the motorcycles farting down the main road...

...indignation bordering on compassion for the way destitute black boys are treated in Colombian Armenia...

...In Guatemala he preferred the rotten horror of Tecum Uman to the crumbling glory of Antigua, the putrefaction of Zacapa to the wonder of Coban...

...The name was misleading...

...He had been deliberately avoiding anything a tourist could have wanted to touch as polluted, damaged, defiled...

...By focusing exclusively on proletarian despair and middle-class bad taste, Theroux, whatever his intention, once again gives the lib-labs what they want...