Product Description

"Possibly his best travel book...an observant and frequently hilarious account of a trip that took him to 51 Pacific Islands."
TIME
Renowned travel writer and novelist Paul Theroux has been many places in his life and tried almost everything. But this trip in and around the lands of the Pacific may be his boldest, most fascinating yet. From New Zealand's rain forests, to crocodile-infested New Guinea, over isolated atolls, through dirty harbors, daring weather and coastlines, he travels by Kayak wherever the winds take him--and what he discovers is the world to explore and try to understand.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #633230 in Books
• Published on: 1993-10-19
• Released on: 1993-10-19
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 528 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Despite the euphoric title, Oceania as Theroux ( Riding the Iron Rooster ) experienced it was only occasionally a carefree paradise. In the Trobriand Islands, celebrated by anthropologists for their supposed sexual freedom, the novelist and travel writer found prostitution and fear of rape. Samoa struck him as noisy, vandalized, with American-style conspicuous consumption. The intrepid Theroux discussed world politics with the king of Tonga, encountered class consciousness in Honolulu, mingled with street gangs in Auckland, and lived in a bamboo hut in Vanuatu (formerly New Hebrides), where he investigated a cargo cult and rumors of cannibalism. In Australia he braved the Woop Woop (remote outback) to camp with Aborigines. This exhilarating epic ranks with Theroux's best travel books. It is full of disarming observations, high adventure and memorable characters rendered with keen irony. First serial to New York Times Magazine; BOMC featured alternate; QPB alternate.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
The best-selling author of My Secret History ( LJ 4/1/89) and Riding the Iron Rooster ( LJ 6/15/88) spent 18 months in a one-man collapsible kayak exploring such exotic Pacific islands as New Zealand, Australia, the Soloman and Cook Islands, Fiji, Samoa, Tahiti, Easter Island, and Hawaii. Never a kind-hearted chronicler of place, he sets out on this voyage in an especially dour mood, leaving behind a failed marriage and expecting to be diagnosed with cancer at any moment. Soon after he escapes the crowded towns of Australia, however, he starts to lose some of his harsh edge and enjoy his travels, which ultimately heal him. A brilliant storyteller with an eye for the absurd, Theroux takes the reader to little-known places where time seems to have stood still and people lead simple lives totally unrelated to 20th-century America. Highly recommended for all libraries. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 2/1/92.
- Lisa J. Cochenet, Rhinelander Dist. Lib., Wis.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
The peripatetic author of Riding the Iron Rooster, etc., etc., ventures with a collapsible kayak to the remote and scattered islands of the South Pacific. With a farewell to his marriage, and loneliness at his back, Theroux begins his extraordinary mission in New Zealand's Fiordland (``As long as there is wilderness there is hope''), moves on to Australia (a continent ``terrified by its own emptiness''), and then to Melanesia, Polynesia--Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, Tahiti, New Guinea's Trobriands, etc.--and, finally, Hawaii. He paddles the sea, he says, in the wake of myth-makers Melville, Stevenson, Gauguin, Maugham, and the Frenchman Captain Bougainville, who, in 1768, believed he'd found not only the Garden of Eden but Venus when a ``barebreasted Tahitian girl'' climbed into his ship from a canoe. To keen-eyed Theroux, the Polynesian islands are ``pleasant and feckless'' but far from paradise. Even Gauguin's Marquesas are ``dramatic at a distance'' but ``close up--muddy and jungly and priest-ridden.'' Traditional islands are ``riddled with magic, superstition, myths, dangers, rivalries and its old routines.'' Always interesting are Theroux's encounters with archaeologists who have disproved Thor Heyerdahl's popularizing theories about Polynesia. Sifting through human and animal bones, they study a still-mysterious people who carved some 800 stone statues on Easter Island and who boasted navigational skills that sent them migrating during what was Europe's Dark Ages. A sense of being beyond the reach of civilization comes when, in his intrepid kayak, off Easter Island and between the rock-battering surf and the Pacific, Theroux removes his headphones, ``hears the immense roar of waves and the screaming wind,'' and is terrified. A vast and contemplative book, seeing the ``Pacific as a universe, and the islands like stars in all that space.'' Informative not only for the voyager, but also for those wanting a new perspective on the Western continents of home. (Sorely lacking a map.) -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

Unapologetically Direct
A terrific read, Theroux has the courage to be politically incorrect in an age where Americans fear speaking the truth of their own experience.
As a travel writer myself, I am always astonished when someone is angered because my travel experience does not mirror his own, as is the case with other reviewers here.

Yes - he should have stayed home
It's been some years since I read this book but it still comes back loud and clear - what a bitter person he was. He "toured" the South Pacific right after he got divorced - and he distrusted and hated everybody. The book was published as we (me, wife and 2 teenagers) we sailing thru the SoPac in our sailboat - and having a wonderful time with the people, the islands, the beautiful environment - where people were happy and environmentally concerned - and this was 1991-1995. We loved it all and he was a bitter fool to miss it all.

Theroux should've stayed home....
Good grief, if I wanted a tale filled with hours of tooth-gnashing hatred and bitter invective I can just go to work. It's certainly not the sort of atmosphere I enjoy when reading a travelogue to try and escape my workaday existence.

I understand that the South Pacific is not the ideal place, but it is depressing to read Theroux' constant struggle to express any sense of joy in his travels or the people he meets along the way.

For an alternative, more light-hearted, still realistic take on the South Pacific with far less spleen, I highly recommend Tony Horowitz' "Blue Latitudes".