The Pillars of Hercules: A Grand Tour of the Mediterranean
by Paul Theroux

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Book Reviews of The Pillars of Hercules: A Grand Tour of the Mediterranean

Book Review: a brutal but honest tour of today's Mediterranean
Summary: 5 Stars

Though Paul seems at time a romantic, quotting descriptions of places from epic poetry, the Illiad, or modern works of fiction, time and again he finds something different, and often that is a great deal more gritty, spent, or to use some of his massive vocabulary, enervated, melancholy, moribund, or lugubrious (I had to use a dictionary several times in reading it, but hey, I learned something). Though some of it comes off as depressing, some quite depressing, I wouldn't have it any other way; he tells it like it is, describing the places he really saw and the people he really met. Avoiding the tourist's Mediterranean, not wanting to just see ruins, castles, and pretty beaches, Paul shows us in this work how the people live, work, and play in the countries of this great "Inner Sea." Expressing "traveller's guilt" at times for being a "voyeur," Paul observed often times the sorrows, tragedies, and miseries, but also the joys and the friendliness, of the inhabitants of this part of the world.

Paul does not romantize any of the countries he sees. He describes in detail the desolate look of the Spanish seacoast in winter (Paul deliberately traveled in the toursit off season), of all the English-language signs, cheap hotels, billboards, shops selling cheap souvenirs, trailer parks, all waiting forlornly for the summer hordes of tourists, a vacation mecca that was more English than Spanish. He goes into considerable detail his efforts to understand the bloody spectacle that is the bullfight in Spain, talking to Spaniards everywhere and even attending a few (and watching some in smoky bars in Spain), but never develop a true comprehension (or liking) for it. He visits war-torn Slovenia and Croatia, sharing dirty hotels with desperate refugees, worried about snipers, harrassed by police at border checkpoints, looking at bullet and mortar holes in ancient structures. His time in Albania is surreal, a land of screaming and whining beggars, virtual starvation, a land that just recovered from one of the most xenophobic dicators in history, one that mandated everyone has his own bunker and not even own his own car - his description of Albania alone was worth the price of the book. Northern Cyprus he spent some time in, a ghost-town, a phantom nation, one that doesn't exist except in a legal limbo, cut-off from the rest of the island by the Green Line, forever a truncated failure of a country, in reality an expensive Turkish colony. He referred to Greece as "the ragged edge of Europe," a poor country that was basically a slightly better Albania as it were, a nation that was not really modern and an EC welfar state, and despite its rich cultural history, the people of that nation today - he writes - are not really truly aware of or part of the heritage of Aristotle, Pericles, and Archimedes. I could go on at length here, but suffice it to say his portraits of each country are fascinating. Some are a bit brief; he doesn't spend that much time in Slovenia for instance (not as much as he did in Croatia for example), and I got the impression in Morocco he was just glad his trip was finally ended.

The book is not perfect though. Some of the locations I thought he would spend more time on, specifically Jerusalem, Istanbul, and Venice, but perhaps if he did the book would be massive. At the very least in Istanbul there were political and terrorist problems, thus complicating his stay. All in all though I found this book quite worthwhile.

Summary of The Pillars of Hercules: A Grand Tour of the Mediterranean

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