The Pillars of Hercules by Paul Theroux

The Pillars of Hercules Reviews

• 
  Jeff

  Why do you bother to read travelogues, Jeff?
  
  1. Between working in the adult film industry and a stint for the Royal Canadian Mounties, I traveled extensively as part of my job in international industrial espionage and it’s always fun to read about places that I only saw at night while wearing a ski mask. Travel tip: A wool ski mask is especially difficult in tropical weather.
  
  2. It’s always nice to get a unique perspective on a time and place. Theroux traveled around the Mediterranean in the mid-90’s when Yugoslavia was tearing itself apart, but before the current crisis in Syria.
  
  3. Travel humor is the best. Bill Bryson’s jabs are usually as subtle as using an anvil to crack a walnut; whereas, Theroux deftly uses his dry wit like a switchblade in an alley flight.
  
  4. I like to learn about stuff. You’re never too old to handle a well-lubed metric ton of info-dump. Theroux traveled from one pillar of Hercules all the way around to the other, mixing history, literary illusions, random observation, and his extensive knowledge of porn to make this one of his better travel books.
  
  5. Not being much of an asshole, it’s nice to vicariously live via someone else’s assholery. Theroux was especially astute in his ability to “harass’ the locals. In Syria then under dictator, Hafez al-Assad, this was especially wince-inducing. For Bryson, there’s never a target too small or big for his juvenile brand of humor.
  
  6. “It’s a nice place to visit but I wouldn’t want to live there” can be modified to “It’s a piss hole of a place and I will never set foot there in my lifetime.” Theroux finds the wonderful and equally dreadful things everywhere, sometimes in the same locale.
  
  7. Books are designed to take you elsewhere, why not transport you to an actual journey through the eyes of a skilled and gifted writer.
• 
  Buck

  Paul Theroux is not a nice man. It isn’t nice to say that Albanians look “retarded”. It isn’t nice to point out that Greece is a welfare case sponging off the EU and milking a cultural legacy it has dishonored with its parochialism. And it certainly isn’t nice—it is, in fact, downright impolitic and a bit sinister—to take such obvious pleasure in despising Israelis.
  
  But nice people, as a rule, don’t write great travel books. They write "heartwarming tales" full of spiritual uplift and multicultural group hugs. Niceness—complacent, undiscriminating niceness—is basically sluttish. It smiles at stupidity and winks at injustice and consults its own comfort.
  
  I don’t know if The Pillars of Hercules is a great travel book, but it’s definitely an interesting one, and that’s saying something, because the Mediterranean is the most overdone body of water in literature. Theroux may be a hater, but he’s what Hazlitt used to call a "good hater": his hatred generously makes room for all kinds of odd passions and sudden sympathies.
  
  If you really must travel—and personally I think more people should stay home and watch CSI—Theroux’s example is as good as any.
• 
  Jenny Brown

  I'm about 1/3 the way through and yes, he is one cranky old man and annoyingly full of himself. This isn't anything new, but in the past he was also a very good travel writer. This, alas, is no longer true.
  
  In this book he's become lazy. He goes from place to place getting on one boat or train after another and interacting only with the people he randomly encounters: the proprietor of the he hotel, others waiting for transport, the lunatics who accost strangers in public places.
  
  It's as if he's gone "work to rule" on filling this book contract. He's signed a contract to write a book where he goes to all these places he's damned if he's going to do anything more than he has to when he gets there.
  
  For example, he goes to Robert Graves' home on Mallorca but tells the reader almost nothing about Graves, who was one of the more interesting authors of the 20th century. What he does say about Graves is so telegraphic you'd have to know a lot about Graves before reading it to understand it. (He throws off a one liner, for example, about how Graves threw out his lover and found another White Goddess.) Theroux doesn't bother to meet with Graves' children who were living in the house when he visited, either. It would be one thing if this was because they had rejected a request to meet him, but he admits he didn't even bother to contact them. Lazy.
  
  Note: I did finish it and it got worse. Once out of Western Europe Theroux sees what he expects to see, applying racial and national stereotypes to everyone he meets based on a phrase or two he overhears or elicits. His antisemitism is pervasive and unpleasant, and very familiar to anyone who lives in Massachusetts and knows people raised in the class he grew up in.
  
  What is the most wearing--and revealing about the author in this book--is the way he continuously excoriates the other foreigners he meets for being tourists while flattering himself that he is a "traveler." Not once or twice but every few pages. The world, to Theroux, is infested with people who travel the same places he goes and enjoy them. A lot of them turn out to be Germans who he loathes for reasons he considers so self-evident he doesn't share them with the reader. Indeed, as far as I've read (he's just left Croatia) he's never actually brought any Germans to life with his pen, but dozens of times he's used the term "German" in the same kind of tone most travelers save for bedbugs.
  
  In short, the once perceptive Theroux has become lazy, and traveling has become a distasteful pursuit he must follow to earn the very comfortable living that lets him spend the rest of his time in Hawaii basking in his fame.
  
• 
  Oceana2602

  Theroux amuses me.
  
  I know that not everyone likes his sarcasm and that he is seemingly never content with where he is (but then, which great traveler is ever contempt with where he is? Isn't that why we travel?). I find him intelligent and entertaining, and because I don't always agree with him, he makes me look at the world in a new and interesting ways. That he managed to do that when he wrote about Europe, my home, shows even more what a great writer he is.
  
  The Pillars of Hercules is everything you could want from a Theroux book. Personally, I liked "The happy Isles of Oceania" better, but intellectually this is his best book so far. I hope his new one is released soon.
• 
  Inês França

  At his best, Theroux is a lovable grump, at his worst a poster person for #whitepeoplesproblems.
  At a certain point, reading this book became an ordeal. Can someone edit this man, please?
  And by the way the "portuguese" saying he quotes near the end? "Quando con Levante chiove, las pedras muove" isn't portuguese and rather a strange combination of spanish and italian (funny he wouldn't notice, since he keeps pointing out how fluent he is in italian), which made me doubt every single turkish sentence written.
  For all his talk of wanting see "real places" and "real people" he really comes into his own surrounded by wealthy excentrics in a luxurious cruise. Theroux, don't fight it, dude. You're just a white, waspish, snobbish man. Just embrace it. Let me hear those cruise menus again.
  
• 
  Rex Fuller

  Reminded myself why I swore off of Theroux’s travel books years ago. Although I finished this one, like the others, it was not so much travel as a report on the four inches between his ears while going to the ports of the Mediterranean. Hoped to get a kind of update on many of the same places I had been–especially in Turkey–and was disappointed to get Theroux’s egotistical and misanthropic attitude towards everything. My recommendation: avoid his travel books (there are vastly more palatable travel writers) and stick to his fiction, which isn’t as larded with him.
• 
  James Hartley

  I like Theroux. I like his grouchy old man act and I like the books (not a fan of the novels, though). This one is entertaining and informative and well-written. It´s also another example of a book written not so long ago at all but which, thanks to the Internet gap, seems to be from another world - the author making phone calls to Honolulu in bars and being amazed at this, for example.
• 
  Jessaka

  While I love some of his other books this book was a hard read. He rushed through these countries and towns so fast, that I didn't feel that I learned anything other than bits of history.
• 
  Missy J

  This is my fourth Paul Theroux travel book and the first one I am giving three stars. I had high expectations and it fell somewhat flat. Some parts I enjoyed reading, but others were really boring. Paul wasn't even sure if he wanted to write this book. In his previous travel books, I enjoyed his journeys through the Polynesian islands, taking the railway from Boston across Latin America all the way down to Patagonia and his train journeys through China. This time he travels along the Mediterranean coast (skipping Lebanon, Libya and Algeria), a region which he said he had never set foot on, but read a lot about.
  
  His journey begins in Gibraltar and he travels along the coast of Spain and France to Mallorca, Corsica, Sardinia and Sicily. Then he continues along the coast of Italy, Slovenia and Croatia. In the eastern Mediterranean, his trip becomes a bit more chaotic and he often has to trace his way back to Italy in order to reach other places. The Yugoslavian War is waging during that time (early nineties) and there are some places in the Arab world, he was advised not to visit. He talks a lot about the books he read of the country he has visited. He meets some incredible authors like Naguib Mahfouz in Egypt and Paul Bowles in Morocco. I was shocked to read that in the nineties many beaches of the Mediterranean were already littered, I don't know if that is still the case or if there has been any improvement. His favorite countries were Syria, Tunisia and of course Italy because of the food. He is quite lucky to have seen Syria before the Syrian War. It made me sad thinking of how much the war with ISIS has destroyed very important historical places in Syria. We really lost a lot there. I got the feeling that he didn't like the touristy aspects of the Mediterranean, which is why he was critical of the real estate boom in Spain and Greece. He also doesn't like welfare states. He likes the less developed parts of the Mediterranean and avoided sightseeing, which sometimes was impossible. I remember when I read his book journey in Polynesia and in China, Paul was sort of restless, critical and very witty. This time around, he has calmed down and is somewhat boring, especially in Italy. Maybe because he speaks Italian fluently, the unexpected didn't hit him. Or maybe it's because he blends in very well in Mediterranean society, most people ignored him and nothing interesting happened. Luckily, the story picked up again when he took a luxury cruise ship across the Mediterranean and then a Turkish cruise ship where he was the only foreigner on board. That showed me his interesting side again and how he adapts and talks to people. The people on both ships were such contrasts to each other. It is really the people who make the novel for Paul. Remembering the Moroccan Jewish taxi driver in Haifa who complained about the Arabs, but when he tagged along with Paul to visit an Arab Christian writer, he was so touched by their hospitality and words. I was also touched by the old woman in Croatia who was living in war but didn't want to take Paul's money for the coffee he had in her restaurant, because they had a good conversation about life ("I had to travel here to find a token of generosity, from a skinny woman in a cafe, in a town full of shell holes, in the shadow of a war. Perhaps war was the reason. not everyone was brutalized; war made some people better.").
  
  Some other quotes from the book that I liked:
  
  [on what he looks for in books]"Originality, humor, subtlety. The writing itself. A sense of place. A new way of seeing. Lots of things. I like to believe the things I read."
  
  "'Look, we are Croats, but last year my father was robbed of almost five thousand U.S. dollars in dinars, and the robber was a Croat!' He laughed. He was busily eating spaghetti. "Serbs are Protestants, Croats are Catholics, Bosnians are Mussulmens. Me, I can't understand Slovene or Montenegrin or Macedonian. It is like French to me. Bosnian and Serbian and Croat language are almost the same. But we don't speak to each other anymore!'"
  
  "That was the strange thing about a tourist resort without tourists. The town had been adapted for people who were not there. The hotels looked haunted, the restaurants and shops were empty, the beaches were neglected as a result and were littered and dirty. Few of the shops sold anything that a native or a townie would be likely to need or could afford. So the place was inhabited by real people, but everything else about it seemed unreal."
  
  "After that, whenever I read about troop maneuvers or politicians grandstanding or mortar attack on cities or the pettiness and terror of the war, I thought about this skinny man and wife, each one holding a bag, pushing their little boy down the quay at Split, their starved faces turned to the Mediterranean, waiting for the ferry to take them away from here."
  
  "'Are you a religious person?'
  'No. I have no religion,' he said. 'Religion is false. Christian, Muslim, Jewish - all false.'
  'Why do you think that?'
  'Because they cause trouble.'
  'Don't they bring peace and understanding, too?'
  'People should be friends. I think it is easier to be friends without religion,' he said. 'You can have peace without religion. Peace is easier, too, without religion.'"
• 
  John Purcell

  Slightly masochistic to being reading a travel book during Lockdown Two, The Inevitable Return. But though painful, I feel a bit better for doing so. Paul Theroux travels in such an accidental manner, going here or there on a whim, talking to strangers, taking risks, preferring the uncomfortable to the familiar that The Pillars of Hercules is less a guide to the Mediterranean and more a gentle encouragement to break out of our bubbles so that we might see this world and its people as they are.
• 
  Jeremy Forstadt

  In THE PILLARS OF HERCULES, Paul Theroux travels a well-trodden path, for once, and one which has perhaps been excessively romanticized in the past. In contrast to many of the other regions of the world in which he has traveled and of which he has written, the Mediterranean has a long literary history consisting of native writers and expatriates alike. In much of this book, Theroux manages to skirt the most touristed regions of Mediterranea while seeking out the landmarks and icons (some living) of the literary Mediterranean. In some ways, THE PILLARS OF HERCULES is substantially different than any other travelogue published by Theroux.
  
  In other ways, however, this book remains true to the Theroux we have always loved or reviled. How could it not be? Theroux's acerbic pen has not lost its bite, and his misanthropic self is as prominent a character in this book as it is in all his others. Now, however, he is treading a sacred path: one which, for once, may have been crossed by a substantial number of his readers.
  
  Beginning in Gibraltar, Theroux's plan is to circumnavigate the Mediterranean while remaining as close to the water's edge as possible. The plan to stay within sight of the water sometimes causes Theroux (or perhaps it provides the excuse he needs) to miss some of the more popular locations of the Grand Tour, yet it keeps him close to those who make their livelihoods at the shores of the great sea. In one of the most traveled regions on earth, Theroux manages to find those out of the way places--not gems perhaps, but surprisingly untouched by the tourist trade--where we can really experience a sense of place and of culture.
  
  THE PILLARS OF HERCULES ends up being a deeply satisfying work for those who love to travel in a vagabond manner, though perhaps not for those whose travels consist of packaged tours and managed activity schedules (and perhaps not as well for those possessed of eternally sunny dispositions). Whatever your travel preference, I would strongly recommend this book to anyone pondering a Mediterranean vacation. There is bound to be something interesting or entertaining here for anyone.
• 
  Michelle Warwick

  I'll confess from the start that a travel memoir is just not my kind of thing and so I probably started reading this book rather resentfully.
  
  I just so desperately wanted to be proved wrong. Sadly I was not.
  
  This book delved into the dull minutiae of his trip to the extent that I was simply bored by it. The book contained sweeping generalisations about the countries, cultures and people he encountered on his travels and there were no great insights that I could glean.
  
  I suppose now is the time that I admit I only got half way through before getting so annoyed with the man that I threw the book across the room and declared I could not possibly take any more.
  
  This is just not for me.
• 
  Shovelmonkey1

  This is another excellent travel book and unusual in its approach as he circumnavigates the Mediterranean, never straying from the coastal route, examining the cultural similarities and differences between all the countries who share one common border - the Middle Sea. The book is very well written, amusing and insightful. Theroux also thoughtfully introduces us to a hefty reading list as he quotes at length from other travel books which have already dealt with each country. A must for any arm chair traveller and a capsule guide to the Med with a handy reading list combined.
• 
  Jon Stout

  Having enjoyed several of Paul Theroux's books, especially
  Sir Vidia's Shadow, I thought a tour of the Mediterranean would be great. I like Theroux's rough and ready (former Peace Corps) style of travel, except occasionally when he goes luxury class.
  
  Starting from Gibraltar, Theroux has to zigzag in order to cover the islands and to avoid political conflict. I was surprised to remember how much violent discord there is in the Mediterranean. He zigzags in the former Yugoslavia, unable to transit Montenegro, and he also has to avoid Lebanon, Libya and Algeria.
  
  I like Theroux's habit of reading and reviewing the literature of whatever place he is visiting, and he seeks out authors whenever he can. In Egypt he searches out Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz, and is awed by his brave, fatalistic attitude toward having been attacked by an extremist.
  
  Even though the Turks are always smoking and the service is wretched, Theroux warms to their courteous and personable ways. He seems at his best travelling by bus from Turkey through Syria and Jordan, appreciating the almost Biblical village life along the way. In Israel he visits an Israeli Christian Arab writer, Emile Habiby, and is again inspired by a positive view of the future.
  
  He finishes in Tangier, Morocco, visiting the aging author Paul Bowles. Theroux has his likes (Turks and Italians) and his dislikes
  (dictators and security officials and tourist hucksters), but he is always prodding and questioning and interesting.
• 
  Ricardo Ribeiro

  What I like in this book and this author: the writing and traveling style, the areas chosen for his wanders. What I don't like: everything else. I don't like his arrogant ways - it's not nice from the author to call someone judgmental when he is a great example of a judgmental person. Then we have the sheer ignorance. I have news for Paul Theroux - to mention just a couple examples from the top of my memory: Mostar is in Herzegovina, NOT in Bosnia. It was the Croats NOT the Serbs who bombed the old bridge of Mostar.
  
  Then it's truly puzzling is management of the book's space. As we know, the author decided to travel around the Mediterranean and write a book about it. It's difficult to understand that about 70% of the book is about the European shores of the sea. It's difficult to understand the whole dull chapter about Gibraltar and basically nothing about Greece, a country and a people who suffers the most of the judgmental character of the author.
  
  As in another book I read from the author, it's annoying his attraction to dialogue with people who have nothing interesting to say... or are biased... it's a pity that he wastes so many pages quoting Americans, English, Australians... well, anyone who's an English native speaker. It's arrogant, like only these illuminated have something interesting to say and [almost] all the locals are just there to entertain the traveler with some picturesque sentences.
• 
  Marti

  Generally when I think "Mediterranean," the first thought that comes to mind is the Cannes Film festival. Theroux's idea was to start at Gibraltar (one of the Pillars of Hercules on the Europe side of the straight of Gibraltar, and do a circle around the entire Mediterranean and end up at the other "Pillar" in Morroco).
  
  He wanted to stick to the shoreline because the towns located just a few miles inland, were radically different. There was -- he said -- some sort of invisible moat that kept people away from the ocean. Much of it did, in fact, resemble an industrial wasteland like exit 14 in Newark. He quotes books covering the same ground, written a hundred years ago by people like Edward Lear and James Joyce. Thus itinerary starts in Spain, continues through France, Italy, Sicily, the Adriatic, Cyprus, Albania, Greece, and the Middle East. [Although he could not do all of it because when the book was written in the 1990s, Bosnia, Algeria, and Lybia were at war]. And he does most of his travels off season to see the real people.
  
  Though he admits he’s never been to Spain, he dismisses the entire country based on the worst parts (Costa Del Sol and off-season British resorts. However, he did like the Dali Museum and Cadaques, even if he does not spend much time there.
  
  The heel of Italy is similarly dismissed as being “like Ireland after the potato famine.” However, he meet some old men in a very remote place that used to be Italy’s answer to Siberia where one of the authors of a book he read had been exiled. He passed on Foggia, which was too bad only because I spent one day there. I would have been interested to see what he said about it because it seems like the kind of sad sack place he was purposely seeking out.
  
  One of the better stops was “Rimini,” the childhood home of Fellini. “Aside from Rome, it is the most ‘Fellini-esque’ place you can go.” It sounded better than Trieste (where James Joyce taught English for a while). His description, made it sound like Antwerp. From there he endures a desultory sojourn through Slovenia ("Is there anything to see here?" "NO! THERE IS NOTHING!"), he lands in war-torn Croatia.
  
  I was most interested in Albania because I worked with someone who was from there. Theroux could not travel directly there from Croatia, and had to cross back to Italy to get a boat there. When he told Italians where he was going, they all said, "Why the hell are you going there?" My former co-worker told me that Borat was based on an actual Albanian newscaster. I had a hard time believing Albania was as bad as she described [this was in 2005], but this book proves that it was probably worse. She even witnessed a Serb chop off a boy's arm and put it in a soup. Theroux describes bus stations that had been vandalized, leaving derelict overturned vehicles with broken windows. [I am sure it is a hipster's paradise now].
  
  All in all, this did not sound like a fun trip, but that is why it stuck me as funny. He certainly met a lot of very oddball characters. One thing I noticed is that Theroux really prefers the people of Turkey and the Middle East [in his estimation, Greece was worse than Albania in which he found some redeeming qualities eventually].
• 
  Liz Estrada

  Though a bit dated (published around 1996) and many countries have changed significantly since, including borders and political unrest, this is still one of the best travelogs I've ever read. The basic concept was for Paul Theroux to travel and see both Pillars of Hercules, one being English Gibraltar (in Spain) and the other directly across the Straight in Spanish Ceuta in Morroco, ironically. But instead of going directly across from one pillar to another, he decides to go the real long way and go up and all around the countries that border the Mediterranean Sea and finally end up pretty much where he began his journey.
  Great writing and insight, historically accurate, witty, clever and sometimes just laugh out loud funny, this travel book will make you see the ancient Mediterranean in a new light and, if not too familiar with that area, a geography course to boot: from his obvious love for Italy, Syria, Tunisia and Turkey, to his disdain for Israel, Greece(??, really?), France and especially Albania, which, at the time, he called totally backwards and filled with retards! There were some inaccuracies that I noticed (one being the fact that he was in Spain in winter and mentioned seeing several corridas-bullfights- but that is impossible since there aren't bullfights at that time of year there; he must have seen them on some other trip and put it in this book, I suppose. But at least he is 100% anti bullfighting!). He was ill advised to visit Lebanon, due to Israel's bombing of that country and avoid Libya and Algeria at all costs. Most surprisingly, to me, was how "cool" Syria seemed! He does blame Brits and German tourists for ruining much of the coast of the Mediterranean, and in that we are in agreement. If you like sarcastic, cynical and down right politically incorrect writing and aren't easily offended,, this book is for you.
• 
  Leftbanker

  I remember first coming across this book and I just thought to myself, “Damn, a travel book about the Mediterranean. I should have written that.” I have read almost everything Theroux has written. He really is a fine writer but travel writing—for me at least—needs to be more than pretty prose. I am looking for insights into the culture. He was such a whiner in this book, even more than usual. In Spain he complained about the food. Where in the hell was he eating? From vending machines? Next he bitched about the bullfights. What is he, a 14 year old vegan schoolgirl? What the fuck did he think was going to happen at a bullfight? Next he was invited to a party in Barcelona. He got to mix with a lot of people who sounded really interesting. All he had to say was that they all smoked cigarettes. That was his brilliant observation. What a douche bag.
• 
  Sorin Hadârcă

  Great journey. I liked the way Mediterranean coastal towns in Spain, Croatia, Israel and Tunisia were described as being more alike than their inland neighbors. Plus Theroux is a great travel companion: he meets people. Not just celebrities like Mahfouz or Bowles but also taxi-drivers, farmers, street vendors. Puts you on a move...
• 
  Kolumbina

  I am a big fan of Paul Theroux. And this is one of his earlier books. What a great book. Enjoyed it thoroughly.
• 
  Bob Schnell

  Paul Theroux would make a terrible travel companion (in person). He doesn't stick to any plan or schedule, and he asks a lot of personal questions. As a travel writer, however, he is head of the class. "The Pillars of Hercules" documents his travels around the coasts of the Mediterranean, for better or worse. Since most of his time there is off-season, he puts up with a lot of bad food, poor lodgings and some very inclement weather. He does, however, get to know a lot of locals and fellow travelers who share his general disdain for tourists and their impact on the communities that cater to them. He travels by foot, car, train and a variety of boats but avoids airplanes which means spending a lot of time looking at the scenery and reflecting. He also makes a point of visiting the places he is told to avoid, unless they are actively murdering foreigners (i.e., Algeria).
  
  Theroux's observations are hilarious, sad, poignant, angry and righteous. He has no goal other than to see places he has never been before so, in that sense, he comes away pretty satisfied. And so does the reader.
• 
  Wayne Jordaan

  I started reading this book because, one, I enjoy Paul Theroux 's travel writing and, two, I need a book that covers Montenegro. Well, I travelled all the way to the Balkans with the author, only to discover that travelling into Montenegro was not possible. Bummer, but the disappointment passed quickly, because my first motivation held true.
  
  The Mediterranean shores are well-travelled and much written about, and a large part of the enjoyment of this book derives from Theroux’s anecdotes about some of these writers, both travellers and natives, past and present (circa 1993-94). Memorable in this regard is the visits to Naguib Mahfouz (whilst the latter is recovering after a near fatal attack from a fanatic) and Paul Bowles in Tangiers. It goes without saying that the TBR list has lengthened somewhat after this great read.
  
  
• 
  Raghu

  Reading this travelogue almost twenty years after it was written in 1995, I still found it not only very enjoyable but also quite educational. On the one hand, I could see how things have changed so much for the better now in countries like Croatia, Bosnia and Israel. On the other hand, countries like Syria, Greece and Egypt have slipped into bigger problems while nothing much seems to have changed in Algeria, Italy and Cyprus. This book is a classic Paul Theroux travel book. Even though he travels the touristy-Mediterranean coast, starting from Gibralter, going east all the way to the Levant and then returning along the southern coast via Egypt, Tunisia, and Morocco, there is enough of the Theroux-magic. The narrative shows his sharp eye, his scholarly knowledge of the region and its civilizations. Juxtaposing excerpts from the works of Yeats, Lawrence Durrell, Evelyn Waugh, James Joyce, Naguib Mahfouz and others, he brings the region alive and makes his Grand Tour a memorable one for the reader as well. Since the Mediterranean coast is home to so many European nations and peoples with recent turbulent history, Theroux delights in provoking them with polemical questions in order to draw them out and find material to record in his diaries. The result is a book with many perceptive observations on various nations and their people. The following are some of the observations that caught my interest:
  
  While noting that Spanish towns and cities are flush with pornography, he writes, "..a country's pornography is a glimpse into its subconscious mind, revealing its inner life, its fantasy, its guilts, its passions, even its child-rearing, not to say its marriages and courtship rituals...it contains many clues and even more warnings.."
  
  Travelling through Syria, Jordan and Israel while bypassing Lebanon, he says, "..these countries were so small! One of the marvellous atrocities of our time was the way in which the self-created problems of these countries and their arrogant way of dealing with them, made them seem larger, like an angry child standing on its tiptoes. They were expensive to operate, had vast armies, indulged in loud and ridiculously long-winded denunciation of its neighbours. All this contributed to the illusion that they were massive. But no, they were tiny, irritating, shameless and vindictive and they occupied the world's attention way out of proportion to their size or importance...." This is vintage Paul Theroux!
  
  Nor does Greece or Albania impress him. He describes Albania through a series of adjectives and nouns - beggars, dilapidation, poverty, hunger, young underground people, stolen cars, bad roads, poor diets, Hoxha graffiti . He writes about `Hakmari - 'the culture of revenge that permeates Albanian society, cruelty to the animals in its zoo and the proliferation of pornography after liberation.
  
  On Greece, he lets his pen have a free run. " ...the Greeks struck me as being more xenophobic than the French, more ill-tempered and irrational, in a country more backward than Croatia. They sneered at Albanians and deported them, cursed the Turks, boasted of their glorious past, manufactured nothing except tourist souvenirs, did not even clean its beaches of litter....by being accepted into the EC (now EU), Greece had become respectable..."
  
  The Israelis give him a hard time and he repays them in kind with his powerful prose. "...they were gruff, on the defensive, rather bullying, graceless and aggrieved with a kind of sour and gloating humor. They were sullen, somewhat covert and laconic. They seemed alert, watchful, yet incurious - alert to all my movements, yet uninterested in who I am....I didn't mind their treatment of me because they treated each other no better..."
  
  All this seems to confirm the usual criticism of Paul Theroux being a misanthrope. However, he is generous in his praise for the Turks with whom he travels for a fortnight on a cruise ship from Istanbul through the Levant and back to Istanbul. "It was relaxing to travel among people with so few prejudices, who were so ready to laugh, so ready to let themselves be mercilessly interrogated by me. They had a rare quality for people so individualistic - politeness....". He reiterates it later when he returns to his ship in Haifa, saying that it was a relief to be back among the courtesy and politeness of the Turks after the experience of Israel.
  
  There are other observations and one-liners as well. At one place, he writes, "`After a man has made a large amount of money, he becomes a bad listener'. Anyone living in Silicon Valley and not having made much money, would attest to this!
  In Syria, after seeing many statues of the then dictator Haffez-al-Assad, he writes, " any country which displays more than one statue of a living politician is a country headed for trouble.."
  
  Readers like me, who are fans of Paul Theroux, would certainly enjoy this book because it is written in his typically uncompromising style. The trait I like best in the author is his ability to say things as he feels about them without worrying about critics. In addition, there is a wealth of material about the countries which share the Mediterranean coast, its people, their literature and culture. You would hardly notice that the book is 500 pages long.
  
• 
  Barbara

  This is the account of Paul Theroux's travels to the countries along the shores of the Mediterranean. The contrast between the living conditions and cultures in such a small area is striking. Some of the places he visits are Italy, the Greek Islands and Athens, Albania, Croatia (in 1995 while the war is going on), Turkey, Israel, Egypt and Morocco. Some of the many things I value in his books are his visits with writers. This time, it is Naguib Mahfouz and Paul Bowles. As usual, he doesn't take airplanes, traveling by train, bus, boat, cab and foot. One striking difference this time is that he accepts a free trip on a large, expensive cruise boat. He writes of the contrast between the two modes of travel without really sounding any more judgemental than usual. But, he does make comments throughout his travels which some will find objectionable. That is one of the joys of Theroux.
  
  One of my favorite things about his travel writing is that he rarely talks much about the obvious tourist sites. In fact, he rarely goes to the obvious places. There is a paragraph in this book that pretty well defines his approach:
  Places had voices that were not their own; they were backdrops to a greater drama, or else to something astonishingly ordinary, like the ragged laundry hung from the nave of a plundered Crusader church in Tartus, on the Syrian coast. Most of the time, traveling, I had no idea where I was going. I was not even quite sure why. I was no historian. I was not a geographer. I hated politics. What I liked most was having space and time; getting up in the morning and setting off for a destination which, at any moment--if something compelled my attention--I could abandon. I had no theme. I did not want one. I had set out to be on the Mediterranean, without a fixed program. I was not writing a book--I was writing my life, and had found an agreeable way to do it.
• 
  Adam Ghory

  Four and a half stars. Mr. Theroux always uncovers a wealth of insights while traveling, and it's fun to trollop around with him. Here's a nice sentence:
  
  There was undoubtedly a more hallucinogenic experience available in poppy-growing Turkey than a long bus ride through Central Anatolia, though it was hard for me to imagine what this might be after a twenty-three-hour trip in the sulfurous interior of a bus of chain-smoking Turks, as day became twilight, turned to night, the moon passing from one side of the bus to the other, gleaming briefly in the snow of the Galatia highlands, fog settling and dispersing like phantasms, glimpses of dervishes, day dawning again, another stop, more yogurt, children crying in the backseats, full daylight in Iskenderun, rain in Antioch, all windows shut, the stale smoke condensing in brown bitter slime on the closed windows as fresh blue fumes rose from forty-nine burning cigarettes in this sleepless acid trip on the slipstream of secondhand smoke.
• 
  J. Dolan

  How many countries border the Mediterranean Sea? Let Mr. Theroux tell you, and in the process about the people who inhabit each, what they eat and how they live, the past, present, and future of both them and their lands.
  For a year and a half he circumnavigates what could pass for the world's biggest lake, sharing its people and their stories, both the celebrated and common. Learn the differences and similarities between the Turks and the Tunisians, the Libyans and Lebanese, for if there's one thing you'll end up doing on a Theroux trip, it's learn. And short of being there yourself, have almost as much fun doing it.
  And what eccentric, world-famous novelist should he come across living in Tangiers? No spoiler alert here, you're going to have to find out yourself.