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The dark star safari5/20/2023 It was during that period that the author “got a glimpse of the pattern my life would take” to Theroux “Africa, “for all its perils, represented wilderness and possibility.” As a young man serving in the Peace Corps during the early 1960s, Theroux worked in Malawi as a teacher. This in mind, the reader of Dark Star Safari should brace himself like Theroux does: for moments of happiness along with all the expectations of misery, encountering the picturesque while expecting the appalling.ĭark Star Safari is in great part Theroux’s own story of his relationship with Africa. The other form of travel-the form through which Theroux traverses Africa-reminds us that “travel is transition.” It’s the type of travel that requires “going slowly, crossing national frontiers, scuttling past razor wire with my bag and passport,” the whole time “being reminded that there was a relationship between Here and There, and that a travel narrative was the story of There and Back.” In one form, a person can be transported from the familiar to the foreign quickly, and in relatively comfortable fashion. Paul Theroux’s most recent travel narrative, Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town (Houghton Mifflin, 2003) is a vivid reminder that there are two types of travel.
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