Paul Theroux

This is a great critique of Theroux from the Guardian by the man himself!

"I had been travelling for more than 10 years - in Europe, Asia and Africa - and it had not occurred to me to write a travel book. I had always somewhat disliked travel books; they seemed self-indulgent, unfunny and rather selective. I suspected that the travel writer left a great deal out of the book and emphasised the bright surfaces. "Couleur locale has been responsible for many hasty appreciations," Nabokov once wrote, "and local colour is not a fast colour." I hated sightseeing, and yet that was what constituted the travel writer's material: the Pyramids, the Taj Mahal, the Vatican, the paintings here, the mosaics there. In an age of mass tourism, everyone set off to see the same things, and that was what travel writing seemed to be. I am speaking of the early 1960s.
The travel book was a bore. It annoyed me that a traveller hid his or her moments of desperation or fear or lust. Or the time he or she screamed at the taxi driver, or mocked the folk dancers. And what did they eat, what books did they read to kill time, and what were the toilets like? I had done enough travelling to know that half of travel was delay or nuisance - buses breaking down, hotel clerks being rude, market peddlers being rapacious. The truth of travel was interesting and off-key, and few people ever wrote about it.
Most travel writing was about vacations and comforts, not real journeys and ordeals. So the very words "travel writing" were debased to the point where I hated to use them, but what else was there, and how could I reclaim them? Now and then one would meet the real thing in a book: Evelyn Waugh mistaken for his brother Alex in Labels; Naipaul's explosions of bad temper in An Area of Darkness; the "I hate Mexicans" parts of Greene's The Lawless Roads; or the human encounters, full of dialogue, in Anthony Trollope's The West Indies and the Spanish Main. In these and other cases, something human happens and was recorded. That seemed to me the point of travel writing.
Some people say that the travel book is a type of novel, that it has elements of fiction in it, that it comes out of the imagination and is a sort of strange beast - half the prosy animal of non-fiction and half the fabulous monster of fiction, and there it stands, snorting and pawing the ground, challenging us to give it a name. There are, no doubt, books that fit this description: little trips that writers have worked up into epics and odysseys. You want to write a novel but you have no subject, no characters, no landscape. So you take a trip - a couple of months, not very expensive, not too dangerous - and you write it up, making it sound harrowing, dramatising yourself, because you are the hero of this - what? Quest for a book, perhaps.
This is not my line of work at all. And when I read such a book and I spot the fakery, the invention, the embroidery, I can read no further. Self-dramatisation is inevitable in any travel book - most travellers, however dreary and plonkingly pedestrian, see themselves as solitary and heroic adventurers. The odd thing is that the real heroes of travel seldom write about their journeys. Some time ago, I received a thick book detailing the travels of a young man through metropolitan France: "essential reading for Francophiles, Francophobes, gourmets, gourmands and any curious traveller in truly modern Gaul". It is as though this overprivileged, well-trodden and easily seen country were terra incognita. There is a place for such books, catering to vacationers, but I would rather read of an adventure in a less accessible land."