AUTHOR PACKS MAXIMUM ADVENTURE INTO `OTHER LIFE'.Byline: D.K. Tkac Special to the Daily News Title: ``My Other Life'' Author: Paul Theroux Paul Edward Theroux (born April 10, 1941) is an American travel writer and novelist, whose best known work is The Great Railway Bazaar (1975), a travelogue about a trip he made by train from Great Britain through Western and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, through South Data: 456 pages, Houghton Mifflin Houghton Mifflin Company is a leading educational publisher in the United States. The company's headquarters is located in Boston's Back Bay. It publishes textbooks, instructional technology materials, assessments, reference works, and fiction and non-fiction for both young readers Co.; $25 Our rating: Four Stars ``Life has no apparent plot, and so it seems messier than fiction,'' states Paul Theroux, the main character in real-life author Paul Theroux's newest novel ``My other Life.'' Theroux, the novelist, has written a tall and, possibly, not-so-tall tale about a writer of the same name and this character's life journey - all in the first person. Not complicated enough? Well, then, consider that author Theroux does such a masterful and clever job of melding fact and fiction that we, the reader, ponder ``Is this the real Paul Theroux?'' Our story begins with a pubescent pubescent /pu·bes·cent/ (pu-bes´int) 1. arriving at the age of puberty. 2. covered with down or lanugo. pu·bes·cent adj. 1. Theroux and his mysterious and eccentric Uncle Hal, for whom ``strange things happened.'' Theroux then tastes freedom and discovery into the unknown as an English teacher in Nyasaland and in upcountry Africa during a stay at a leprosarium lep·ro·sar·i·um n. pl. lep·ro·sar·i·ums or lep·ro·sar·i·a A hospital for the treatment of leprosy. - ``a little world of illness.'' A short time later, life, crammed with the events and urgencies of love, marriage, children and debt, finds our protagonist first in far-off Singapore and, more solidly, as a writer, happy family man and expatriate living in Dorset, England. Theroux's character writes a book ``strange, true, comic, and unexpected. I wanted people to believe it and like it and to find something of themselves expressed in it.'' As a best-selling author and travel writer, Paul Theroux, in ``My Other Life,'' translates his love and knowledge of London, warming the page. The reader is transported, believes, likes and finds comfort in Theroux's fictionalized life and its peculiarly British irritations, including a well-documented dinner party with the Queen and Prince Philip. Leaving London abruptly, Theroux moves back to the United States, finding himself at New York's La Guardia Airport with ``no one ... waiting for me.'' He is sorrowful sor·row·ful adj. Affected with, marked by, causing, or expressing sorrow. See Synonyms at sad. sor  row·ful·ly adv. , unable to write or travel, but on the verge On the Verge (or The Geography of Yearning) is a play written by Eric Overmyer. It makes extensive use of esoteric language and pop culture references from the late nineteenth century to 1955. of newly discovering ``the meaning of life and the source of all art.'' Theroux believes that a person reading a wonderful book is overwhelmed by feelings of inspiration and ignorance, bafflement baf·fle tr.v. baf·fled, baf·fling, baf·fles 1. To frustrate or check (a person) as by confusing or perplexing; stymie. 2. To impede the force or movement of. n. 1. and belief. Bravo. Well said. Delectable. And, will the real Mr. Theroux kindly stand up? |
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