Book of the Month: Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, by Paul Theroux

This month Trip Lit is popping a bottle of vintage bubbly to celebrate Paul Theroux's new tome, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, the writer's best book since The Great Railway Bazaar, the masterwork that launched his travel writing career—and liberated an upcoming generation of travel writers, including me—when it was published in 1975.

This triumphant similarity is no coincidence: In Ghost Train, Theroux retraces the journey he made in Railway Bazaar, traveling by rail (resorting to a few bus, ferry, and plane rides when unavoidable) from England to Japan and back. His quest is to see how that world has changed in 33 years—but invariably, his account also measures how much he has changed as well.

For Theroux, train travel is "probably the best way of getting a glimpse of how people actually live—the back yards, the barns, the hovels, the side roads and slums, the telling facts of village life, the misery that airplanes fly over." His method is to hop a train from one place to another, and then to pause and wander the markets, museums, and back alleys for a few days, meeting random people, sometimes touring with local experts. While this kind of drop-in journalism presents obvious limitations, Theroux is such a honed observer and expert at extricating the telling detail or anecdote that his observations and analyses ring true.

In his new account, Theroux focuses on a dozen and a half countries: England, France, Romania, Turkey, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, India, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Singapore, Cambodia, Vietnam, Japan, Russia. His descriptions of despotic Turkmenistan, heartbreakingly benighted Myanmar, bright-blossoming Vietnam, and ineffable off-the-beaten-path Japan are especially transcendent.

Part of the power and appeal of Ghost Train derives from trademark Therouxian characteristics: detailed dialogues; an embrace of the uncomfortable and idiosyncratic; a meticulous avoidance of the easy epiphany and travel-brochure cliché; an unflinching ability to explore and evoke a place's dark side; impassioned indignity at the follies of political officialdom and the depravities of war.

But retracing an old route bestows an even deeper-layered poignancy, enabling him to recognize and celebrate people and places whose lot has improved in the past 33 years—and to recognize and celebrate the improvements in his own life, too. Incisive as always, but wiser now and happier too, Theroux infuses his new-old world with a wider, more compassionate worldview.

So—pop! Here's a Trip Lit toast to a career-capping classic from a travel writing mentor and master.