Approaching his 84th birthday, Paul Theroux introduces this collection of stories with an epigraph taken from Samuel Beckett’s Malone Dies. “The end of a life is always vivifying” seems to suggest this might be his last round-up, but it also points to the vanishing point of the title having two possible meanings. Something which has been decreasing may be finally disappearing, but it can also bring realisation.
This anthology is divided into three sections. The stories in Hawaii Nei take place on those Pacific islands while the ones in Elsewhere happen further afield, as one might expect from a writer as famed for his travel writing as his fiction.
Unexpected endings and frequent insight make for a high strike rate, but perhaps best of all are those collected as Aide-Mémoires where Theroux reassumes the biographical mantle of Andre Parent he previously employed for his 1989 novel My Secret History.
They stretch from his time as a boy scout, where themes of prejudice and the childhood search for identity are explored in Camp Echo, through gaining understanding of what was ahead (“I’d had a glimpse of what it meant to be an adult”) and accepting his calling (“It was an intimation…that writing this down might help ease my mind”) in Stop & Shop, and on into old age.
For girls of my generation, especially working class girls, lack of confidence was touted as a positive
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This and The World after Gaza: holding the West to account
May All Your Skies Be Blue by Fíona Scarlett: Hopeless dreams in working-class Dublin
Roisin Meaney: ‘I’m well on my way to being crowned Crazy Cat Lady of West Clare’
If we can assume they are indeed biographical then they reveal where Theroux finds himself as the “ticktock of time grows louder”. In First Love the ghost of an old amour resurfaces, but at least “a writer can always dispose of those extra memories”.
In The Silent Woman he deals with a researcher from a generation who do things differently while he works on Burma Sahib, his actual last novel about the young George Orwell. The surprise and self-deprecating ending sets up Ghost Fest, where the elderly become invisible and he is literally talking to himself. The closing Finitude imagines an award acceptance speech which would “resonate” and “represent a summing up”.
When a friend asks Andre if he’s still working, Parent/Theroux replies that “it’s not work, it’s how I live, it’s what I do, and I want to keep doing it. Think of it…in the nature of a farewell”.
If these are the final words from this grand old man of letters then they are good and true ones.
