The Great Railway Bazaar (by Paul Theroux)

I finished one book on the drive home and had to go to Border’s
for a new book to get me through dinner. I thus interrupted
my current naval reading theme with the quick read of a famous and
excellent travel book: The Great Railway Bazaar: by train through
Asia by Paul Theroux (ISBN-10: 0618658947, originally published in 1975).

My husband and I have a work trip to Bangalore later this month so
the description of train travel in India was particularly of interest;
however, Theroux’s chapters about travelling in Viet Nam in 1973 just
before America withdrew were fascinating and sadly in line with
current events.
Since John and I have a long drive between work and home, I read him
funny or specially well written sections of The Great Railway Bazaar.
John’s favorite passage was:

The romance assocated with the sleeping car derives from its extreme
privacy, combining the best features of a cupbord with forward movement.
Whatever drama is being enacted in this moving bedroom is heightened by
the landscape passing the window: a swell of hills, the surprise of
mountains, the loud metal bridge, or the melancholy sight of people
standing under yellow lamps. And the notion of travel as a continuous
vision, a grand tour’s succession of memorable images across a curved
earth — with none of the distorting emptiness of air or sea — is
possible only on a train.

Theroux funded his trip with a series of lectures and seems to have
carried a small and superb library along with him. The Great Railway Bazaar is full of quotes and literary references. For example,
Theroux includes a long passage then writes: “There is more, and it is
all good, but I think I have quoted enough to show that the best description
of Calcutta is Todger’s corner of London in Chapter IX of Martin
Chuzzlewit.”

Theroux has strong opinions about people, places, and national character.
Here he is writing from Hue, Viet Nam about the local railway stationmaster:

He was certain that Turkey was just over the hill, and the only difficulty
he envisaged — indeed, it seemed characteristic of the South Vietnamese
grasp of political geography — was getting Loc Ninh out of the hands of
the Viet Cong and laying tracks through the swamps of Cambodia. His
transcontinental railway vision, taking in eight vast countries, had a
single snag: evicting the enemy from this small local border town. For the
Vietnamese citizen the rest of the world is simple and peaceful; he has
the egoism of a sick man, who believes he is the only unlucky sufferer
in a healthy world.

The author is no less critical of his own nation, America. In the chapter
“The Saigon-Bien Hoa Passenger Train” in Viet Nam he writes of some houses
with no drains that he could see from the tracks:

They were appropriate in a country where great roads led nowhere, where
planes flew to no purpose, and the government was just another self-serving
tyranny. The conventional view was that Americans had been imperialists;
but this is an inaccurate jibe. The American mission was purely
sententious and military; nowhere was there evidence of the usual
municipal preoccupations of a colonizing power — road-mending, drainage,
or permanent buildings…. Planning and maintenance characterize even
the briefest and most brutish empire; apart from the institution of a
legal system there aren’t many more imperial virtues. But Americans weren’t
pledged to maintain.