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eBook The Lower River epub

by Paul Theroux

eBook The Lower River epub
  • ISBN: 0547746504
  • Author: Paul Theroux
  • Genre: Fiction
  • Subcategory: Genre Fiction
  • Language: English
  • Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (May 22, 2012)
  • Pages: 336 pages
  • ePUB size: 1491 kb
  • FB2 size 1403 kb
  • Formats lit azw mobi docx
Paul Theroux Genre Fiction English

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All rights reserved The Library of Congress has catalogued the print version as follows: Theroux, Paul.

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003. The Library of Congress has catalogued the print version as follows: Theroux, Paul. The lower river, Paul Theroux. p. cm. ISBN 978-0-547-74650-0.

Paul Theroux the author can be as controversial as Paul Theroux the person. Ellis returns to the place in Africa called the Lower River, where he once found happiness and contentment only to discover that all has changed. A witless Hock becomes a pawn and captive in the struggle for survival in a place he no longer understands and a place from which he cannot escape. Theroux's novel is a fascinating and engaging work.

The central character in Paul Theroux’s latest novel, The Lower River, is an American named Ellis Hock who decides . Paul Theroux has traveled widely in Africa.

The central character in Paul Theroux’s latest novel, The Lower River, is an American named Ellis Hock who decides to return to Africa after an absence of almost 40 years.

Читать онлайн - Theroux Paul. The Lower River Электронная библиотека e-libra. ru Читать онлайн The Lower River. Paul Theroux The Lower River I said to him: I’ve come - but not for keeps. But who are you, become so horrible? He answers: Look. I am the one who weeps. Dante, The Inferno, Canto 8 (ll. 34–36) PART I: Saying Goodbye 1 ELLIS HOCK’S WIFE gave him a new phone for his birthday. A smart phone, she said.

The Lower River book. Anyone who has read Paul Theroux knows one of his key themes is the American innocent abroad, refusing to acknowledge the dark side of the people he encounter. r himself. Ellis Hock never believed that he would return to Africa. In many of his past novels, his characters are transplanted into a new culture and struggle to survive against environmental, cultural and psychological pressures. For those who enjoy Theroux, his latest novel does not disappoint.

The Lower River is all about being misunderstood: madly, wildly and very nearly fatally. The sad yet bitterly funny opening chapters are a beautifully taut portrait of a man at the end of his tether. After a lifetime on duty behind the counter of Hock's Menswear – which, like its owner, is out of tune with the times – Ellis Hock's life is one day ruined. It is a masterly, moving portrait of how Africa ensnares and enchants and plays merry hell with sentimentalities.

Paul Edward Theroux (born April 10, 1941) is an American travel writer and novelist, whose best-known work is The Great Railway Bazaar (1975). He has published numerous works of fiction, some of which were adapted as feature films

Paul Edward Theroux (born April 10, 1941) is an American travel writer and novelist, whose best-known work is The Great Railway Bazaar (1975). He has published numerous works of fiction, some of which were adapted as feature films. He was awarded the 1981 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel The Mosquito Coast, which was adapted for the 1986 movie of the same name.

Other books by Paul Theroux at BookBrowse. Membership Advantages.

The Lower River is riveting in its storytelling and provocative in its depiction of this African backwater, infusing both with undertones of slavery and cannibalism, savagery . The Lower River - Paul Theroux.

The Lower River is riveting in its storytelling and provocative in its depiction of this African backwater, infusing both with undertones of slavery and cannibalism, savagery and disease. Read on the Scribd mobile app. Download the free Scribd mobile app to read anytime, anywhere.

Award-winning writer Paul Theroux draws upon personal experience of living in Malawi in his eye-opening novel, about one man's return to an Africa he no longer recognises, The Lower River

Award-winning writer Paul Theroux draws upon personal experience of living in Malawi in his eye-opening novel, about one man's return to an Africa he no longer recognises, The Lower River. Decades ago Massachusetts salesman Ellis Hock spent four years in Africa - and the continent has never left him. So when his wife walks out and his business goes belly up, Ellis turns back to the one place in which he briefly found happiness. Yet returning to the village of Malabo shocks him. The school he built is a ruin. The people he remembers are poor, apathetic, hostile

Ellis Hock never believed that he would return to Africa. He runs an old-fashioned menswear store in a small town in Massachusetts but still dreams of his Eden, the four years he spent in Malawi with the Peace Corps, cut short when he had to return to take over the family business. When his wife leaves him, and he is on his own, he realizes that there is one place for him to go: back to his village in Malawi, on the remote Lower River, where he can be happy again.Arriving at the dusty village, he finds it transformed: the school he built is a ruin, the church and clinic are gone, and poverty and apathy have set in among the people. They remember him—the White Man with no fear of snakes—and welcome him. But is his new life, his journey back, an escape or a trap?Interweaving memory and desire, hope and despair, salvation and damnation, this is a hypnotic, compelling, and brilliant return to a terrain about which no one has ever written better than Theroux.
Comments: (7)
Iarim
I tend to lean toward writers that I like personally and that are genuinely good people - James Hall, Tim Dorsey, Carl Hiaasen, James Swain, Michael Connelly, Jeffrey Shaara, etc. I try to avoid those who I know to be or who are reputed to be churlish, arrogant, etc. like Paul Theroux. I mean, why put funds in the pockets of those who cannot bother to at least be civil to their fellow man?

Sometimes, however, the talent overrides the deficits in personality and warrant a look at the work. I find Theroux to be a very talented writer but a bit uneven. I've enjoyed much of his travel related non-fiction but tend to find his fiction to be quite variable in quality. Still, he is a wordsmith of rare quality so when I came across this story I decided to give it a look.

The theme is a common one. One reaches the golden years and remembers the glories of youthful days. In this case, as his life collapses around him - his wife discovers text messages to some of the women who shop at his men's clothing store on a cell phone she bought him. Said messages are more in the line of a friendly familiarity than of a lascivious nature but that doesn't seem to matter as the relationship ends in divorce, the daughter demands "her share" lest he start a new family and squeeze her out of her just rewards, his business is trapped in a downward spiral due to cheap imports and the move to casual dress styles.

So, thinks he, when was he the happiest in his life? Why, the 4 years he spent as a Peace Corps volunteer in a small village in Africa, where he built a school, started a medical clinic and developed a fascination with snakes. Well, dump his life, load up a satchel with money and head on back there for adulation and respect, a life of ease among the villagers.

Naturally, a bit has changed in 40 years and it is the current state of the village that entraps him in many ways. The question hangs over the story as it unfolds, "What would you do? How? When?" Other questions related to the nature of life and man hang over the story as well.

Certainly a worthy and entertaining read.
Lamranilv
Paul Theroux the author can be as controversial as Paul Theroux the person. He is an accomplished writer and outspoken critic of misguided philanthropic overtures from the likes of Bono, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, whom he labels as "mythomaniacs" content on promoting their largess as a way of convincing the world of their worth. In a "New York Times" (2005) opinion piece, Theroux laments being hectored about African development by a wealthy Irish rock star In a cowboy hat (aka Bono); a figure who earns a place as a contemptuous look-a-like in Theroux's novel. He also exploits the detachment of the likes of billionaire Bill Gates (Bono being one of his trusted advisers) for his unproductive and insane idea to send computers to Africa when they need "pencils, paper, mops and brooms".

Theroux's novel "The Lower River" chronicles in the abstract some of Theroux's experiences teaching in Africa. He does this through the exploits of the main character Ellis Hock who had taken a similar trek in life as part of the Peace Corps. Through Ellis Hock, Theroux visualizes "the school[s] where we taught 40 years ago are now in ruins - covered with graffiti, with broken windows, standing in tall grass. Money will not fix this." - For "[T]hey will eat your money and then they will eat you." And it is through this disillusionment that Ellis Hock will become captive to his past, figuratively and literally. Theroux's novel is fundamentally structured in two parts; the one being the story itself the other being Theroux's passion about the underlying destructiveness of misguided largess that reduced a people to be "changed, disillusioned, shabby, lazy, dependent, blaming, [and] selfish" a theme not lost in its similarities to current events in European countries like Spain, France and Greece today.

The story in main is about one Ellis Hock; one of life's losers adrift in a world he can't seem to relate to; someone who sees his life having ended, facing a failed marriage, a failed business and a failure as a father and who now yearns for an earlier time when he was a teacher in Africa for the Peace Corps. Ellis returns to the place in Africa called the Lower River, where he once found happiness and contentment only to discover that all has changed. A witless Hock becomes a pawn and captive in the struggle for survival in a place he no longer understands and a place from which he cannot escape.

Theroux's novel is a fascinating and engaging work. His characters of Ellis Hock and Sena tribal leader Menyanga are tuned to provide a spider and fly sort of plot that will keep the reader on edge right up to the final conclusion.
I highly recommend you add this novel to your reading list and rate it "memorable".
Voodoogore
The Lower River explores the career and memory of a former Peace Corps volunteer returning to the small African nation where he worked as a young man. This is a subject Paul Theroux knows well as a former Peace Corps volunteer. In retrospect Theroux's narrator Ellis Hock (a stand in for Theroux ), had come to view his years in Africa in something of a golden light. After a series of disasters; a business failure, a marriage at an end, and a daughter demanding her inheritance prior to his death, he seeks solace and comfort that he once found in the small village of his Peace Corps years. The remainder of the novel conveys Ellis's gradual disillusionment and dismay. As the novel progresses Ellis finds there's no African Eden. The profound changes in the village since independence alarm him. Like many Peace Corps volunteers, Ellis probably never fully understood or comprehended "his village" or that the villagers had minds of their own, and that time, like the river, does not stand still. Like a number of other readers I was taken back by Throux's grim view of Africa and Africans, "They will eat your money and then they will eat you." Theroux is a gifted writer but this particular novel is bleak and the narrative unrelenting dark. For me the nightmarish scenes with Zizi and Ellis as he commands this young girl to dance, were the modern equivalent of Conrad’s "Heart of Darkness." In summary, The Lower RIver is a hard, difficult, and unrelentingly gloomy read. Sadly, this is one I cannot recommend to any but the most dedicated Theroux fans.
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