Coincidences and travelling

Paul Auster's The Red Notebook is a full of surprising coincidences.

Recently read Paul Theroux' semi autobiographical My Secret History. Since the book covers several periods of the main character's life, one can only quess what has happened in between. Here, too, the effect of almost coincidental events is skillfully spelled out: if there were no boat accident, Andy Parent might have ended up being a priest; if he did not have enough courage to speak to a young British lady in Malawi (and if her friend had not gone to the bathroom)..

Theroux tells about his experiences as a school teacher in Malawi and Uganda in the late 1960's. Previously I had read his "Dark Star Safari" from 2000; he re-visits Africa. Interestingly, he observes that "Africa is materially more decrepit than it was when I first knew it, hungrier, poorer, less educated, more pessimistic, more corrupt". Theroux has seen too much to force just one explanation for the decline, but many examples he quotes in both My Secret history and Dark Star Safari reveal stunning waste of resources and possibilities due to short sighted planning.

Theroux naturally mentions another great travel writer, V.S. Naipaul, both in My Secret history and Dark Star Safari. Naipaul's Among the Believers has a cleverly simplistic theme. Naipaul travels to Iran, Pakistan, and Indonesia just after the revolution is Iran 1979 and asks government officials and clerics some very simple questions like "how are going to make this work?". He seldom gets good answers.

One of the Naipaul's questions "how are you going to make banks works", has got an unexpected answer in the 2000's. Islamic banks have been a success.

Naipaul won the Nobel price 2001, seemingly. Gao Xingjian won the price 2000. Needless to say, his Soul Mountain is good. It's strangely captivating though it does not seem a story as such. His short stories in "Buying a fishish rod" are very good, too.. It's quite understandable that he left China; his stories are quite far from propaganda and his characters far from heroic workers.

Bruce Chatwin is yet another great travel writer. Songlines, his account on travels among the abos in Australia, is very interesting.