Customer Reviews

My Other Life

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

*My Other Life* is a unique and brilliantly executed masterpiece that defies genre classification, and is, for me, Paul Theroux's best work and greatest book, superior to his earlier *My Secret History*. The writing is fluid and tight, the stories poignant, sad, and hilarious--and while people often criticize Theroux for being self-indulgent or even monomaniacal, the human insights found in the present volume are as powerful as they are because of the narrator's simultaneous involvement and detachment, which provide for wonderful character sketches and evocative descriptions, the likes of which the author himself has never executed better.

More than with any other book I've ever read, including those by Paul Theroux, this book absolutely defies classification: it is at once a novel (as it's billed), a work of creative nonfiction, a memoir/autobiography, a "travel" book, a collection of vignettes, of essays, of connected short stories, and a work of literary criticism. Theroux is very prolific and has written in all of these mediums, but *My Other Life* manages to be the best work he's done in any of them AT THE SAME TIME! Moreover, this is certainly one of the greatest books on the art of writing and publishing ever written--EVERY aspiring writer would do well to read it.

I quite simply LOVE this book, and rate it among the best I've ever read. More to the point, I can honestly say that this is one of the very, very few books that has actually changed my life, and for the better. And it's an easy, fun, quick read--genius in the guise of talent. I've taken from it new ways of seeing the world, new possibilities--and from my own narrow and limited focuses, new ways of seeing my life. There is not a word wasted here, nor is there a sentence too much--*My Other Life* shows the potentialities implicit in every moment, and the importance involved in the responsibilities of being human.

I found myself totally immersed in the first section about the time in the leper village as a Peace Corp volunteer. I was, of course, utterly convinced that it was autobiographical, and remain convinced about the rest of this "novel". A travel writer reveals so much about himself in other works, why not this one?

If this is not his "secret life", but rather his "other life", then this is the stuff that is no secret!

Beautifully written, whatever the truth is, with a control of language that manages to evoke the dry dustiness of African savanna, or the dripping humidity of equatorial Asia, or the brittleness of London society matrons.

If you like Theroux's travel writing, you will like this.

This book is a strange mixture of autobiography and fiction; an "imaginary memoir" as the author explains in the book's preface: "This is the story of a life I could have lived had things been different". Each chapter is a self-contained short story (or short memoir if you like), and it's often tantalizing to imagine what is real, what is an exaggerated version of the truth and what is pure fantasy. It is probable, for instance, that Theroux met the Queen, but less likely that he found himself briefly alone with her and experienced a burning and reckless desire to touch her, indeed to burst into tears and cry on her shoulder. These sorts of fantasies make My Other Life an often humourous read but there are flashes of whimsy, nostalgia and regret as well.
Some of the chapters are short and epigrammatic; the longer chapters are more satisfying, particularly "The Queen's Touch" (mentioned above), "Poetry Lessons" and "Lady Max". They all feature the typical Theroux trademarks: ironic detachment verging on superciliousness, fluid writing style with clever use of dialogue, and sly humour. He's a page-turner as well: the plots are subtle but compelling, you're drawn into the stories, wanting to know what is going to happen next, yet the tales are not plot-driven and so there is plenty of time for reflection.
In "Poetry Lessons", Theroux recounts a tale that combines poetry with a small intrigue involving a rich, untalented benefactor to whom the narrator is drawn to for his wealth and power yet repelled by his (and his wife's) uncritical vulgarity. The benefactor wants Theroux to teach him how to write better poetry, but it soon becomes obvious that not only does this benefactor lack talent, he also lacks any literary intelligence or worldliness (he asks "which war?" when Theroux mentions the War Poets). Theroux takes artful delight in pointing out to the reader this stooge's solecisms and paucity of literary knowledge.
"Lady Max", again, satirizes the rich and powerful: Theroux feels contempt for the eponymous and vaguely reptilian woman but is strangely drawn into her world, without, apparently, being corrupted by it.
"The Queen's Touch" is very funny, despite its overall tone of quiet desperation. Her Majesty comes across as a rather detached but thoughtful lady, with an aura of wise serenity, while her husband is ridiculed for his intense irascibility:
"This was a man who knew how to express boredom. In order to show me how utterly uninterested he was he worked his mouth, savouring, tasted something foul, pulled a face, then made an effort of swallowing... his relentless negativity and unhelpfulness baffled me."

There is much pleasure to be derived from Theroux's prose: he is a skilful writer: succinct, ironic, with a great gift for a turn of a phrase. My Other Life combines his skill at fiction and non-fiction, and the thought that some of the described events may have actually happened provides us with a frisson of delight.

Over the past 30 years, I have had the pleasure of reading (and in some cases, re-reading with relish) eleven of Paul Theroux's works. "My Other Life" represents his crowning achievement.

Although the preface to "My Other Life" states that "the man is fiction, but the mask is real," Mr. Theroux has experienced enough vicissitudes in life (some painful, as we all do) not to have some real life lessons drip onto the page, even if attributed to a fictional "Paul" or another character entirely. This "novel", if it can be called that, takes the form of a chronological mirror image of the author's real travels and family life, but with the second half decidedly more introspective (mask or no mask), so much so that the reader begins to view the real Paul Theroux with a sense of newfound respect for having come to terms with the rougher side of his life, having eventually made sense of it, and having moved on. Put another way, there is less cantankerousness and more humanity in "My Other Life" than in earlier works.

Yet "My Other Life" never bogs down in navel-gazing; it is simply too entertaining for that. The reader is served up a triple mix of the author's always-exquisite writing style, trademark drollness and some bittersweet vignettes with occasional (self-) analysis to ponder.

Aside from the question of "Who is Paul?", "My Other Life" offers some delicious tales to be savored in their own right: a mysterious woman living a life of seclusion on the English coastline (with a terrific twist ending); the now-famous (in Britain, infamous) episode of a very commanding and somewhat supercilious Queen and suffering Prince Philip at a dinner party; and the author's return to his hometown of Medford, only to end up hanging out with an academically-challenged clique of low-lifers years removed from Theroux who have no idea who he is and who fracture the King's English in a vernacular the author conjures beautifully.

"My Other Life" demonstrates more than any other of Theroux's works why he is one of America's most gifted writers of the last century. 5+ - Highly Recommended.

Although at his worst Theroux can be glib and spooky (as he is in the title piece of this collection), at his best he writes with a melancholy tenderness about his children; about the euphoric escapes from England that can lead to the long loneliness of travel; about the city of London in all its fog and drizzle and smoky winter dusks.

In "Lady Max" the most enigmatic character is a vengeful Lady Bountiful who advances Theroux's literary prospects by mentioning his name to powerful friends and taking him for instructive strolls along the Thames. They walk along the Embankment in the damp air, "next to the whitish, depthless water," while Lady Max points out the church where William Blake got married.

They also visit the Tate and pass a set of "big flat Motherwells, all black shapes like moth-eaten shadows", a description almost as thrilling as Theroux's evocation of Anthony Burgess writing a phrase of music and the way he "took out his fountain pen and drew on a napkin a stave of parallel lines, then rapidly, like hanging fruit on these lines, he inscribed a series of notes."

Women fall into two types (or stereotypes) in My Other Life: black-haired and petitely exquisite on the one hand; and on the other, fair-haired, stocky, and hard to impress.

But men are invariably evoked with a brutal eye: Ian Musprat, the struggling young author of The Dogflud Chronicles, has "flecks of vol-au-vent pastry on his tie and fingers"; his eyes are bloodshot; the knot on his tie "yanked small". And when Theroux flies to England to have dinner with the Queen, he writes a savage but very funny cameo of a "bossy, buttocky" flight attendant who is "male, wet-eyed, twitching to be noticed." Later, at the royal dinner, Prince Philip is portrayed as a cold man, clearly embittered by a long married life of privileged uselessness, a man exacting a lackey's revenge with his "mirthless, barking laugh."

An often brilliant book about writers and the writing life, My Other Life is both merciless and entertaining.

I found My Other Life a wonderful but uneven book. Its premise is very original: It may or may not be the author, Paul Theroux, autobiography. He describes it as "the story of a life I could have lived had things been different". But the reader feels that the fictional memories are not that fictional after all. As you read it you might feel that Theroux would like some things to be different, but not even a writer can erase and change his past.

If I said that My Other life is a uneven book its because the first chapters are fascinating. I loved the young Paul as a young hopeful writer full of dreams that takes him to the most romantic and idealistic places. He was a writer who thought that to be able to write he must know pain. And a lot of pain. So he goes to live in a leper's colony in India.His life keeps changing as chapters pass. He becomes a a young husband and teacher in Singapore; a doting husband, loving father and young writer in London.But as he approaches middle age, his life and crisis become very boring. The reader misses the young dreamer who has turned in the last chapters into an obnoxious man who can't be faithfull to his wife or to his dreams. Well, thats life. Who is the lucky one who can fulfill the promise of his youth?. Paul Theroux sure is a wonderfull storyteller who can fulfill his readers expectations.

...self-indulgent...But that would be too harsh and can't go without explanation.

The book is essentially 456 pages of Theroux (fictional or autobiographical, it doesn't matter) whining...about his writing or lack of it, about his poverty and lack of success as a writer, about people he doesn't like or doesn't understand (usually those with more money or success than himself). You get the idea.

After the first hundred pages or so, I knew where the whole thing was going: this 'novel' (better defined as a collection of loosely related short stories) serves to convey an oblique account of the steady disintegration of Theroux's marriage and how he comes to grips with it and gets on with his life afterwards. He takes his time getting to the point, though, and this hurts. Meanwhile, he spends a great many words complaining about the English, directly or indirectly. Which is perhaps the book's only truly entertaining irony, as he writes in such a very British way that I hardly heard his (allegedly) 'American' voice until very late in the book. Even then, he frequently used accidental Britishisms...no American writer would write 'Cocoa Puffs' and then feel obliged to explain that it was a breakfast cereal, and no American would note that a man 'has a sport' when he means to say that he works out regularly.

Conspicously lacking amid this whine-fest are any solid recollections of his success stories (again, whether fictional or autobiographical, the result is the same). We never hear about the joy of landing a publishing contract, of having a book turned into a movie, of the satisfaction of shepherding his children toward adulthood, of his great travel experiences and sexual flings. We only hear about the bad parts. He was underpaid here; he was underappreciated there. His sexual escapades almost always end in inept frustration. This went wrong, that was miserable, this fell apart, on and on. Taken at face value, one wouldn't know from this book what a success Theroux has really been (even the fictional version).

However, it does have it's good moments. Technically, the writing is excellent, especially when he turns his attention to describing a scene in physical detail - the train ride to Moyo, and the depth of detail in Medford come readily to mind. There are a few very nice chapters, especially in the second half of the book. 'Forerunners' is charming and very clever, if heavily telegraphed, and 'George and Me' is right on. 'Medford - Next 3 Exits' almost worth the price of the book.

I'm still scratching my head over the TIME review blurb on the cover "...a seriously funny novel," as the humor in this book is "minuscule," as Paul's Uncle Hal might say.

I give it three stars, but don't recommend it.

I believe this is Paul Theroux's best "fiction" effort to date. "My Other Life" is a quasi-memoir, built around short stories -- the big and illuminating moments around which people eventually construct their personal histories. Theroux claims it is a book of fiction, and perhaps it is. But the main character's name is Paul Theroux, and his experiences and titled output very much resemble the author's. From Cape Cod, where Theroux recounts a boyhood relationship with a secretly extraordinary uncle, to East Africa, where he teaches English to lepers, to Singapore and poetry lessons for a talentless war merchant, to London, where his career and ambition begin to soar, and then back again to Massachusetts, where his doldrums bring him into the orbit of both strangers and old friends. How closely does this narrative follow Theroux's actually life events? Who knows? Maybe VS Naipaul does.

I like the quality of the writing in this book and the nature of the hero's adventures a great deal more than the actual personality of the protagonist. This is a common conundrum with Mr.Theroux's work. He is a gifted storyteller but comes across in his travel literature and novels ,where the main character is often transparently based on himself, as an insufferable snob. The early passages in this book will ring familiar to readers of "My Secret History" and it should be by now abundantly clear that the author considers himself virtually irresistable to women of every color and nationality and that he often fancies himself the last civilized man sipping taseful vintages and nibbling on an orange while the coarse masses go about burping, copulating, screaming or talking nonsense. It is a strong ego that decides the cosmopolitan nature of a city or household by how many of his book titles it holds. Still, something interesting happenes about half way through this novel: our hero loses his wife, his bearings and some of his self-consciousness, although never his spirit of exploration and he becomes instantly likable. The chapter on his going home to Massachusetts and hanging out with various juvenile delinquents, and other characters who no doubt don't know the right fish fork to use at a bankett in Singapore ,is beautifully nostalgic, insightful and, dare I mention it, humble. Mr. Theroux is a gifted stylist and misery becomes him.

Having lived in several of the countries Mr. Theroux has written about, including Malaysia, Singapore and U.K. and also being a great fan of his favorite authors like V.S. Naipaul and Graham Greene,I highly recommend "My Other Life" to anyone who is interested in the inner life of a writer. This book is certainly one of his best and mirrors his own growth in both his personal and professional lives. I was afraid that this book would bore me, having already read "My Secret History", but I have to say that this book only increased my appreciation for Mr. Theroux as a writer. His abilities in self analysis and in being able to weave a complex story in a thoroughly readable manner makes him one of the most interesting authors around. Whether Mr. Theroux is trying to coyly deceive us into believing that "My Other Life" is only fiction or whether he is only tantalizing us with semi truths is unimportant. This book will keep you wondering at his ever increasing skills as a writer and have you only begging for more.