A while back the philosopher Agnes Callard published an article in The New Yorker called "The Case Against Travel" where she argued that tourism is an overrated experience, almost an institutionalized form of bad-faith: you go abroad to experience some sort of change, but then come back the same person. All that's different is that you saw and did whatever there was to see and do wherever you went. I don't think I agree with the article, but it did give me pause. Is tourism essentially role-playing enlightenment using other places, other cultures as props?

What I like about this book is that Theroux clearly doesn't give a fuck about forcing his long voyage around the Meditteranean, from Gibraltar around to Tangiers, into an enlightenment narrative. Unlike tourists insistently chasing charming "authentic" experiences, he really does genuinely just want to experience whatever there is to experience wherever he is, which will include, among other things, pharmacy store porno mags, the pervasive dogshit on the streets of Marseilles, a bunch of cheap hotels with bad food, and the poshlost of tourists and pushy street vendors, though it also includes plenty of genuinely charming incidents, like a stop-over village where the writer Carlo Levi lived, a period where Theroux hangs with a trio of chill, elderly Arab men, and a visit to the famous expat Paul Bowles in Tangiers.

So what Theroux gives you isn't a moral narrative, but thankfully just the details, spiced up with erudite references to the histories and literary lives of the places he visits (references to the Odyssey, etc). He's a very good observer who also enjoys talking with, and sometimes offending, people, and there's something very pleasurable about the little keyhole views into other people's 1994 lives that his conversations produce. Another of the pleasures is his offhand characterology of all the national or sub-national types he encounters. I have no idea how accurate these are, either now or back then, but you won't be surprised to find out that two of the most perpetually-aggrieved and hot-tempered characters Theroux meets happen to come from a certain country in the Middle East. In fact, though it might just be hindsight, the section in Israel feels drenched in a weird aura of national derangement, as if Theroux were in Camazotz.

This characterology, which you could also just call stereotypes, also connects to one of the book's subterranean themes, which is a lament for a diverse and genuinely "other" Mediterranean, which if it ever existed was already swept by 1994 into a paradoxical combination of phony nationalisms and globalized homogeneity, a bad dialectic between sameness and difference. This is recognizably the world we live in now:

The great multiracial stewpot of the Mediterranean had been replaced by cities that were physically larger but smaller-minded. The ethnic differences had never been overwhelming—after all, these were simply people working out their destinies, often in the same place. But in this century they had begun to behave like scorpions—big scorpions, small scorpions, greenish, russet, black; and now the scorpions had sorted themselves out, and retreated to live among their own kind. I had yet to find a Mediterranean city that was polyglot and cosmopolitan.

Even under the Ottomans, Smyrna had been full of Armenians, Greeks, Jews, Circassians, Kurds, Arabs, Gypsies, whatever, and now it was just Turks; Istanbul was the same, and so were the once-important cities of the Adriatic—Trieste was just gloomy Italians who advocated secession from the south; Dubrovnik was Croatians on their knees, praying for the death of the Serbs and the Bosnians. Greece seemed a stronghold of ethnic monomania, without immigrants. Durrës in Albania was a hellhole of pathetic Shqiperians, and if the Corsican clans had their way there would not be a French person from Bastia to Bonifacio. It was hard to imagine a black general named Othello living in Venice now, though there were any number of Senegalese peddlers hawking trinkets there.