A Writer's Anthology

Title: Sunrise With Seamonsters: Travels & Discoveries
Author: Paul Theroux
Publisher: Cape Cod Scriveners Company
Rating: A+

Paul Theroux has recently become one of my favorite authors. It started a few months ago when I read his book Riding the Iron Rooster. I picked up this book in a thrift store for fifty cents, not knowing what a gem it was. It sat amongst my cluttered shelves for several years before I actually read it, not having anything else to read and being mildly intrigued. And what a trip it was. I had stumbled upon one of the best travel writers of the 20th century.

This is what led me to his anthology Sunrise with Seamonsters, a collection of essays written by Theroux over a twenty-year period. It includes everything from travel narratives to book reviews; he even treats readers to a personal account of his high school reunion.

The progression of the writer himself is apparent in the way the essays are arranged in chronological order, from 1964 to 1984. The voice of the writer begins young and exuberant, working for the Peace Corp. in Central Africa. Through the years, the reader can track the writer's progression; the voice becomes confident, critical, insightful.

Paul Theroux is a writer's writer. He's inspiring. He verbalizes the struggles of writing -- and the exhiliration -- through his own experiences and those of other writers. He is an excellent interviewer. One of my favorite essays is "V.S. Naipaul," the first half of which was published in 1971, the second in 1982. Throughout the essay the reader can sense the influence Naipaul had on Theroux as a young writer and the respect Theroux has for him throughout his life. Theroux wrote, "He has considerable courage, a refined sense of order and an unswerving literary and moral integrity; his eye, attentive for the smallest detail, can give an apparently common landscape or unremarkable physique many features." The reader gets a glimpse of a young, self-conscious, unsure writer in Theroux. This is juxtaposed with the confident and quirky nature of Naipaul himself.

The sights and sounds Theroux observes are sometimes so minute, but he writes about them in a way that makes the reader identify with him. His descriptions are very human. In the article "Discovering Dingle," originally published in Travel & Leisure, 1976, Theroux recounts a trip he took with his family to the southwest coast of Ireland. Most of the article is gloomy as he describes the inclement weather on their trip and the oddness of the Dingle Peninsula. But the ending is so quiet and endearing:

The island hill becomes such a sudden ridge and so sharp that when we got to the top of it and took a step we were in complete silence; no wind, no gulls, no surf, only a green-blue vista of the coast of Kerry, Valencia Island and the soft headlands. Here on the lee side the heather was three feet thick and easy as a mattress. I lay down, and within minutes my youngest child was asleep on his stomach, his face on a cushion of fragrant heather. And the rest of the family had wandered singly to other parts of the silent island, so that when I sat up I could see them prowling alone, in detached discovery, trying -- because we could not possess this strangeness -- to remember it.

One of the biggest draws to Theroux's writing for me is his use of language. In "Making Tracks to Chittagong," 1983, he wrote, "I imagined my itinerary on a map as resembling my own elongated signature written in railway lines across the top of India." The reader not only comes away with a sense of his extensive traveling, but also the actual visual of the railways curling across northern India. It is poetic without being pretentious.

Theroux's success in this anthology is based on how much of his personality shines through in these pieces. His point of view of the world and it's happenings are unique and exquisitely displayed. The candid conversations he has with his readers about writing and living make this an anthology enjoyable to not just writers, but everyone.