Challenged by Africa, a resolutely clear-eyed writer refuses to blink

Dark Star Safari

Overland From Cairo to Cape Town

Paul Theroux

Houghton Mifflin: 480 pp., $28

If countries were food, Paul Theroux would be that unnerving gourmet friend who’s always leading you down dicey alleys into strange restaurants full of bittersweet flavors. It’s a tossup whether he’ll wind up insulting the waiter or forging a lifelong friendship with the chef.

Along with relentless curiosity and the occasional bout of misanthropy, Theroux brings irreverence and astute thinking to his work, even when his itinerary seems more a gimmick than a real reason for a book. (Wandering China by train? Kayaking the South Pacific?) But this book springs from a deeper place than most of the others.

For Theroux, who went to Malawi about 40 years ago as a Peace Corps volunteer and was ejected a year later over politics, the wonders and travails of Africa have been a subject of lifelong reverence and consternation. All of that reflection shows in this excellent book.

The author’s trip, a north-to-south sojourn that includes Egypt, Sudan, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and South Africa, is his chance to take a new measure of what has been gained and lost in four decades of post-colonialism and then to ask what he has gained and lost as an observer. He casts a cold and unblinking eye on staggering landscapes, befouled cities, squandered opportunities, corrupt leaders and sometimes old friends.

Theroux throws a longer shadow than any other living travel writer. At just past 60 -- he celebrates that birthday in this volume -- he is that extraordinarily versatile traveler who can bum rides in trucks or meet with government officials, as his mood strikes.

Advancing mostly overland and mostly by improvisation, he spends Kafkaesque days waiting for inefficient consulate staffers to process his visa requests and interrogates clergymen and taxi drivers, bystanders and bureaucrats, bracketing it all with a pair of visits to literary giants: to start, Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz in Cairo; to wind up, Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer in Johannesburg, South Africa.

At the Uganda-Kenya frontier, he proposes that “a person who has not crossed an African border on foot has not really entered the country, for the airport in the capital is no more than a confidence trick; the distant border, what appears to be on the edge, is the country’s central reality.”

Not surprisingly, the book can be sad and infuriating, but in bits it’s giddy and hilarious too.

“Dazzling white as it loomed from the sea, Zanzibar was an island of smelly alleys and sulky Muslims. I looked around the bazaar and found a grouchy Indian merchant,” Theroux writes.

“ ‘Business is down,’ ” the merchant tells him.

“ ‘When was it up?’ ”

“ ‘Sixty-something.’ ”

The farther he ventures, the further he develops his tough-love thesis that First World handouts have made life too easy for many African leaders. The rest of the world needs to rethink its aid practices, he suggests, or maybe just reduce them, until Africans are ready to do more for one another.

With his anecdotes comes the usual Theroux question: Is the author really as cold and contrarian as he seems, or is he exaggerating himself as a character to liven up the narrative?

In the end, the answer doesn’t matter much. It’s our good luck that he’s constantly going, on our behalf, where he’s not supposed to. In Zimbabwe, he first wangles an invitation to the property of a white farmer whose territory is being seized, then persuades the farmer to introduce him to some of the squatters trying to take over his land. And then, completing the step through this uniquely African looking glass, Theroux conducts a surreal conversation with a squatter who A) demands that the farmer from whom he has stolen land now build him a fence as well and B) complains that other squatters have unjustly tried to seize his land.

The book has one flaw: In his skepticism about the “agents of virtue” -- the nongovernmental charities that collect money to feed, inoculate or train Africans -- Theroux sounds the same complaint several times too many. It’s not that I necessarily disagree with him; I just don’t want to hear the same point (and the same reference to those shiny white Land Rovers that the agents of virtue drive) again and again. Instead, please, more patter from Zanzibar.

*

A guide for the deep of pocket

StyleCity London

Abrams: 192 pp., $24.95 paper

Is it a coffee-table book or a guidebook? Yet another publisher wants to give us something in between. This volume, an early installment in a new series, includes more than 400 jazzy, seductive color photographs inside a high-gloss red-and-yellow cover. Inside are selective listings that lean toward stores, food and drink. But you won’t want to carry it around (too heavy) and you won’t want to rely on it alone in your planning. Just nine lodgings in the city are listed, none priced less than $210 a night.

Still, the high style is mostly well married to the content, and it’s nice to see a series not trying to be all things to all people. Comprehensible maps. Sensible geographic groupings.

*

Short on text, long on pictorial wit

Off the Beaten Path

A Traveler’s Anthology

Laura Stoddart

Chronicle Books: 96 pp., $14.95

This isn’t the greatest, or the second-greatest, collection of quotations about travel I’ve seen, and on the whole, it’s as slight as a book can be. But Stoddart’s illustrations -- elongated figures in spare, symbol-rich landscapes -- drip with elegance and wit. My favorite is the spread on pages 26 and 27: a slinky traveler, in bed (or embedded, if you like), under a gauzy mosquito net draped from impossible heights.

*

Christopher Reynolds’ book column runs twice a month.