Synopses & Reviews
Following the success of the acclaimed Ghost Train to the Eastern Star and The Great Railway Bazaar, The Last Train to Zona Verde is an ode to the last African journey of the world's most celebrated travel writer.“Happy again, back in the kingdom of light,” writes Paul Theroux as he sets out on a new journey through the continent he knows and loves best. Theroux first came to Africa as a twenty-two-year-old Peace Corps volunteer, and the pull of the vast land never left him. Now he returns, after fifty years on the road, to explore the little-traveled territory of western Africa and to take stock both of the place and of himself.
His odyssey takes him northward from Cape Town, through South Africa and Namibia, then on into Angola, wishing to head farther still until he reaches the end of the line. Journeying alone through the greenest continent, Theroux encounters a world increasingly removed from both the itineraries of tourists and the hopes of postcolonial independence movements. Leaving the Cape Town townships, traversing the Namibian bush, passing the browsing cattle of the great sunbaked heartland of the savanna, Theroux crosses “the Red Line” into a different Africa: “the improvised, slapped-together Africa of tumbled fences and cooking fires, of mud and thatch,” of heat and poverty, and of roadblocks, mobs, and anarchy. After 2,500 arduous miles, he comes to the end of his journey in more ways than one, a decision he chronicles with typically unsparing honesty in a chapter called “What Am I Doing Here?”
Vivid, witty, and beautifully evocative, The Last Train to Zona Verde is a fitting final African adventure from the writer whose gimlet eye and effortless prose have brought the world to generations of readers.
Review
"A superb collection....This book reproduces the unsettling but rewarding experience of travel, and will remind readers of 'the expanded sense of possibility that strangeness sometimes brings.'" Publishers Weekly
Review
"Iyer is a master of the ironic detail....Goes where most of us will not go and returns with the dire details." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"Calling Iyer a travel writer is reductive, like saying George Plimpton was a sportswriter....Lacking Iyer's opportunities to 'slip through the curtain of the ordinary,' we're truly fortunate to have his dispatches from the other side." Booklist
Synopsis
Pico Iyer one of our most compelling and profoundly provocative travel writers invites us to accompany him on an array of exotic explorations, from L.A. and Yemen to Haiti and Ethiopia, from a Bolivian prison to a hidden monastery in Tibet. He goes to Cambodia, where the main tourist attraction is a collection of skulls from the Khmer Rouge killing fields, and travels through southern Arabia in the weeks before September 11, 2001. He practices meditation with Leonard Cohen and discusses geopolitics with the Dalai Lama, travels to Easter Island and through the imaginative terrains of W. G. Sebald and Kazuo Ishiguro, weaving physical and psychological challenges together into a seamless narrative.
Throughout his travels, the familiar thrill of adventure is haunted by the unsettling questions that arise for Iyer everywhere he goes: How do we reconcile suffering with the sunlight often found around it? How does the foreign instruct the traveler, precisely by discomfiting him? And how does travel take us more deeply into reality, both within us and without? Intensely affecting, Iyer's explorations are a road map of thinking in new ways about our changing world.
Synopsis
The worlds most acclaimed travel writer journeys through western Africa from Cape Town to the Congo.
About the Author
PAUL THEROUX's highly acclaimed novels include Blinding Light, Hotel Honolulu, My Other Life, Kowloon Tong, and The Mosquito Coast. His travel books include Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, Dark Star Safari, Riding the Iron Rooster, The Great Railway Bazaar, The Old Patagonian Express, and The Happy Isles of Oceania. He lives in Hawaii and on Cape Cod.
Table of Contents
Contents
1. Among the Unreal People 1
2. The Train from Khayelitsha 14
3. Cape Town: The Spirit of the Cape 40
4. The Night Bus to Windhoek 59
5. Night Train from Swakopmund 79
6. The Bush Track to Tsumkwe 102
7. Ceremony at the Crossroads 118
8. Among the Real People 134
9. Riding an Elephant: The Ultimate Safari 160
10. The Hungry Herds at Etosha 180
11. The Frontier of Bad Karma 200
12. Three Pieces of Chicken 222
13. Volunteering in Lubango 242
14. The Slave Yards of Benguela 268
15. Luanda: The Improvised City 297
16. “This Is What the World Will Look Like When It Ends” 320
17. What Am I Doing Here? 333