The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia

Travel Asia by train! Enjoy the way a white writer chooses to detail the many flavours of poverty, squalor, bureaucracy, civil unrest and corruption it has to offer! 🤦🏼‍♂️ The author then seems to be dismayed that things are not messy when he gets to Japan. 🤷🏼‍♂️ The part on Russia seems to devolve into a (really cold)fever dream, but I admit I was skimming towards the very end. 
When he's not being dismissive or appalled Theroux has a way with words. There are occasionally lovely descriptions of passing scenery, he can be flattering about nature, architecture and accommodations, but too often falls into generalizations, regularly unflattering when discussing the people of various countries/places, or those locations themselves, with varying degrees of cultural sensitivity. 
 Always the question in the back of my head: would any of these places or people be as run down and discouraged en masse without a history of colonialism?
 To the author's credit, he does ruminate in detail on the negative effects of the American occupation and subsequent abandonment in the context of the Vietnam War. 
Theroux experiences a wide variety of travel partners bouncing between first and second class: his fellow berth occupants/seat mates/dining companions range from a self-identified junkie, supposed cult leaders to engineers and an attorney general. He also interviews locals and gets into discussions with people he meets associated with his lecture tour. I'm just not sure he liked anyone he talked to. 

Part of the information related seems to be practical observations...but it's nearly fifty years out of date at this point, so while it may or may not be interesting historical trivia, it's an aspect of the work that's lost its usefulness.

I got really tired, really quickly of the ‘colourful insights' after recognizing that sexual objectification seems to be the main way women enter these accounts, if at all. The author isn't necessarily the one doing the ogling/telling tales of sexual exploits, but he seems happy enough to recount all instances by those (men) around him who do. 

I could say this was published in 1975 and it was a product of its time, but I think that serves more as warning to prospective readers than an absolution. 

I'll keep looking for unique travelogues, after a break I might even go looking for another on trains, but I don't think I'll be picking this author back up. 


⚠️racism/xenophobia,misogyny, ableism, transphobia (? Managed two different anecdotes joking about sex with women with penises 🙄), black face (in theatre), mention of SA (in erotic art)