I have to admit I didn't really like this one! This review, this review, and this review (check out the one- and two-star filters; apparently a lot of people share my salt) cover most of why - I don't take issue with the characters or the plot, necessarily, but rather the way in which they were written. The presumption here seems to be that Africans used to be pure, simple, and "unspoiled" before they were "corrupted" by Western society ("People stood straight, worked hard, and were grateful for the smallest kindness. They asked for nothing") , and now they're cynical, bitter, and greedy, expecting Western handouts and willing to do whatever they need to to get them. The narrative's treatment of Zizi really showcases this: she's a teenage girl who is both a servant and a fetish object for Hock, and the reader is repeatedly hit over the head with how she's a symbol of the "pure and unspoiled" Africa that Hock lusts after, but she ends up being "corrupted" just like everything else in the end when she

Spoiler

loses her prized virginity due to a violent rape, which is committed in order to send a message to Hock

. There are plenty of books out there that do a good job of tackling the relationship between Africans and visiting Westerners: ones that recognize that both overarching groups are made up of whole, complex individuals with differing wants, needs, and intentions, and that more directly deal with colonialism and its aftereffects. This isn't one of those books.

I was a big fan of The Mosquito Coast but admittedly I have read only one of Theroux's acclaimed travel books. I found The Lower River to be a joy to read, cover to cover. I simply couldn't put it down.

We all have a place from our past that we want to revisit. If we're lucky, like Ellis Hock, it's a place where we spent four years, where we found first love, where we did something heroic--a place overseas in one of Africa's darkest corners.

Initially, Hock is welcomed back to the village of Malabo, where he spent four years as a Peace Corps worker in the early 1970s. When he left, Malabo--and all of Malawi--had been swept up in the giddiness of independence and hope for the future. Forty years later, and into his 60s, Hock finds the school where he taught in a state of destitution, infested by snakes, populated by AIDS orphans. He soon finds himself trapped, the village chieftain leeching him of his money and his life.

The story reminded me a little of King Lear. Hock's only daughter and wife abandon him all too easily. He has one faithful "daughter" to attend him in Malabo--a 16-year-old named Zizi who is the granddaughter of his past love, an AIDS orphan herself. He also has a fool, in the guise of a leprous dwarf named Snowdon whose only word is "Fee-fee-dom."

The way Theroux draws out the plot is amazing. There will be no resolution until the last two pages--DON'T PEEK--and the story just grows more and more intense.

This is just a great, great read.

I appreciate this book because I love Mr. Paul. Several of his books are on my top favoritest list. Several of his *non fiction* I should emphasize. That being said, his talent for writing crosses over in this book and is apparent, but I found the plot lacking.
I really hope he does another book tour so I can meet him again! Honestly, his travel books changed my life & how I travel & view the world.

I like to think of myself as a glass half-full person but when it comes to my literature I like a half-empty writer. This explains my love for Thomas Hardy--no one can make a character's life more bleak and miserable than Hardy (see The Mayor of Casterbridge). I like to think of Paul Theroux as the modern equivalent. I don't know why but I do love to read a tragedy or about a fall from grace. Maybe it is just a reminder of how good my own life is or a my own ward against tragedy.

I was at my book club Saturday night and mentioned I had just started Theroux's latest novel, the Lower River. One of my friends said, "I hate Thereoux" and admitted to throwing one of his novels in disgust. Another friend sitting next to me said she didn't like Hotel Honolulu--too sexist. I can understand this feeling about Theroux. He often writes about the misguided American abroad in his novels--his most famous being the Mosquito Coast. His characters often have high hopes and dreams and then we get to see them dashed again and again. Even his non-fiction travel writing can seem bleak. He usually travels in the Third World, on trains for the most part and in my mind I always picture Paul Theroux sitting in a dusty depot somewhere waiting and waiting.

But getting back to his latest novel about a misguided American. In the first few pages the hero Hock receives a new cell phone and it is this piece of modern technology that ends his marriage in the first two pages. Hock as he reflects on his life realizes that his happiest memories were those he spent in an African village making a difference by building wells and a school. Hock decides to light out, telling no one and returns to the village. And of course since the author is Theroux--you can never go back. The village has disintegrated further, the school is closed and in ruins and the happiness he saw there because of a revolution has turned to despair and there is menace in the air. Hock makes more than one foolish decision and before he knows it he is trapped in the village unable to leave.

I liked the book--the opening was written by a master of story. Theroux lays a heavy hand with a treatise on poverty and the culture of aid (he in part is reflecting on his own time spent in Africa as a youth and his eventual return). The use of Snakes in the book as a theme is used a bit much. (Warning! Snakes everywhere in this book!) I was compelled to keep reading to find out what happens to Hock. I found the book to be very satisfying.

A deeply disturbing book exploring the dangers of nostalgia and Afro-optimism. Leaves one questioning what hope really means.

Whilst this could be seen as an interesting take on a beloved Africa revisited 40 years later, it wasn't for me. The expectations of returning to happy times and a simple life in Malawi is the route taken when the protagonist, Ellis Hock, loses his business, his wife and his daughter. He heads "home" with the idea of helping and improving the village he remembers so fondly but this feeling of benevolence and paternalism is all wrapped up in such moral superiority that I found myself disliking both character and narrative very quickly (even though I suspect the author required this). His expectations of parachuting himself in and finding a naive happiness is so flawed that I struggled to follow the precept.
A dark, tortured story whose fulcrum is corruption, post-colonialism and imported aid seen from the, inevitably opinionated, unsympathetic 1st world "hero" who cannot possibly be as foolish and as lacking in judgement as he seems.

This one just rubbed me the wrong way. So, Africa doesn't quite live up to the memories of a white man who pined all his life for the happiness he had known as a young man in Malawi? No worries, as a depressed, hapless, middle-aged white man, he'll just travel to the Lower River and find his happiness again. Surely he is owed that? No thank you. I'd rather read about Malawi and Mozambique from the native authors who live in those countries.

After his marriage falls apart, Ellis Hoch returns to Africa... the place where he remembers the happiest time of his life. However, in Malawi thing have changed in the 40 years since he vounteered there. His visit becomes an ordeal when the villagers steal from him, avoid him, and hold him hostage. He reflects on his life and human nature.

By the time this book begins, Ellis is at a crossroads and hesitates after possessing the tailoring. When he learns of a woman who has a monstrous python as a pet and has started to behave strangely, he calls to give an opinion. The snake gained the sleeping habit against its owner - and realizes the animal is taking measurements of the woman and preparing to devour her. The contact with the animal, its smell, and its behavior summon sensations so strongly that it decides to return to Africa without realizing that it is on the way to its destruction and that, like the python's owner, it will have a similar destination sooner or later.
Hock leaves untimely, but Malawi, now independent, does not correspond to the dream kept in his memory forty years later. In Malabo, nothing is left of the school and the hospital; the inhabitants live off the record in a fatal lethargy, and the "white" is no longer welcome unless his pockets are lined with money. Those he had admired for his audacity and simplicity are now thieves, interested only in brutal consumerism; malaria joined by AIDS and wars followed by banditry actions. Little by little, Ellis, paralyzed, is hostage to a situation he does not control, quietly stripped of assets of physical and mental health. In comparison, he was slipping into a dramatic incapacity that refers to the protagonist of Evelyn Waugh in Handful of Dust, that English with the suggestive name of Tony Last, who ends up in the Amazon jungle, defenseless, in the hands of an older man who forces him to read Dickens' works aloud. But suppose Last is a victim of someone else. In that case, the situation that Hock reaches is only a consequence of his conception of Africa and its inhabitants, built around wrong assumptions and distorted by his idealism. While the adventures that feed his nightmare unfold - Festus Manyenga, the soba, and the inhabitants of the surrounding area are increasingly demanding, Hock tries to escape but ends up trapped in an even more frightening situation—a comparison with Joseph Conrad and a fateful journey by Kurtz on the Congo River. Conrad and Theroux based on their own experiences, crossing fiction with autobiographical data, but the first wrote Heart of Darkness as an anti-imperialist manifesto. After witnessing the cruelty and corruption that prevailed in the colonies with significant repudiation, the other view is ambiguous and, if possible, even bleaker.

Theroux is my favorite non-fiction writer with his incisive characterizations and interpretations of events. This novel makes use of those skills and his travels through Africa, especially the more impoverished areas. An American man's life arrives at a series of failures in family and business. He returns to Malawi to relive the only time he felt effective and purposeful as a Peace Corps teacher. You can't go home again...in fact it may never have been home. His beloved village had become one of extreme poverty and starvation held together by the lies and theft that are a part of such deprivation. Reminiscent of Graham Greene's A Burnt Out Case with dashes of Colin Turnbull's A Mountain People, the main character lives through one horror after another in trying to escape...what? Himself? The village? His mistakes? It is a harsh book in its ultra-sharp reality, but it is more than worthwhile. The starving of Malawi had enough in common with those starving souls of Orwell's Paris to make it clear that the painful deceptions the deprived hold on to are fairly universal. The ending was not immediately satisfying but has become more so after living with it for a few days. I still prefer Greene's soul-searching, but Theroux is more authentic.