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Please go to Paul Theroux.com's new site, Paul TherouxFree Computer Help Forum London, Paris, Germany, Africa, provincial Holland, the worlds of
Corsica and Puerto Rico. There are as many moods represented, from the
good host and careerist in “Algebra” to the haunted heroes and
heroines in “Zombies” and “World’s End.”
Most of the people
are transplanted or have tried to graft themselves onto a new culture,
and they struggle against the odds to maintain their humor, to write,
to fall in love or keep their marriages intact. Michael Insole, in
“Algebra,” wants to cook meals for famous people; Professor Bloodworth,
in “The Odd-Job Man,” is making a raid, for the purposes of
scholarship, on a distinguished poet. In “Words Are Deeds,” Sheldrick
glimpses a pretty woman in a restaurant and sets out to marry her; Mr.
Hand, in “The Imperial Icehouse,” wants nothing more than to transport
a shipment of ice from one side of a West Indian Island to the other.
The
novella-length “Greenest Island” is the story of two young castaways
discovering adulthood and the delusions of romance on a tropical
island, “Acknowledgments” and “Yard Sale” are short comic sketches and
yet offer variations on Theroux’s theme: the undoing of innocents
abroad, as farce, as tragedy, and -- in the frightener, “White Lies”
-- as a ghost story.
John Haase in
the Los Angeles Times speaks of Theroux as having “the eye of A. J.
Liebling, the nose of Durrell, and almost the literary scope of Edmund
Wilson. His metaphors and similes are like rare-cut diamonds.” |
