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The Last Train To Zona Verde: My Ultimate African Safari (2013)

by Paul Theroux(Favorite Author)

3.83 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

061883933X (ISBN13: 9780618839339)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

review 1: If you have not read Paul Theroux before, his most recent travelogue, "The Last Train to Zona Verde" is not the best book with which to begin, as it's a valedictory of sorts. Better to start with the travelogue "Ghost Train to the Eastern Star," an account of his journey down the entire continent of Africa, from Egypt to South Africa. Better to start with "The Lower River," his fictional account of a man who goes back in late middle age to the village in Malawi where he had once (like Theroux) been a Peace Corps volunteer.In "The Last Train to Zona Verde," Theroux returns to the Cape Town shantytowns he describes in "Ghost Train," then winds his way through two countries in southwest Africa, Namibia and Angola. Theroux is well known for his antipathy towards Western philan... morethropic organizations and Western celebrities (like Bono) and their efforts---mostly failed, by his account---to ameliorate poverty in Africa. One senses in this new book that he is striving to be fair-minded as he looks at the evidence of some improvement in the slums of Cape Town. By the end of the book, however, he is again thoroughly disillusioned---perhaps more so---by the great sprawling slums that surround the cities he visits. One person he meets comments that these slums seem to offer a vision of what the end of the world might look like.Theroux is happiest in the rural areas he travels through, but as he himself remarks, the bush is in the process of being lost to urbanization, to climate change, to tourism, and to warfare. Everywhere he goes, he sees Chinese laborers doing work that could be done by Africans. In the end, he declare himself unfit to chronicle what he is in fact chronicling: "The traveler in cities needs to understand cities better than I do and not to be disgusted by their chronic deficits; that traveler needs to care more, to be more expert in some areas, more innocent in others, more hopeful."Don't take Theroux at his word here. "The Last Train to Zone Verde" is engaging from start to finish. The sights he describes are sometimes appalling, sometimes hopeful, sometimes comic, and always related in that clear-eyed, unsentimental voice that is like that of no other literary traveler. This is Theroux's last book about Africa, or so he says. Just don't read it first.
review 2: Mais uma extraordinária aventura de Paul Theroux, desta vez na África do Sul, Namíbia e Angola. A ideia era retomar o périplo africano no ponto onde tinha terminado o Dark Star Safari, mas a desolação da realidade actual africana, marcada pela corrupção e pela miséria, e a melancolia pessoal do A, fizeram-no interromper a viagem e, diz ele, despedir-se definitivamente de África, o continente onde viveu e que revisita, pessoal e literariamente, desde a década de 60. Um livro sombrio e pessimista, mas ainda assim uma obra notável de um dos maiores escritores de viagens contemporâneos. less

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