On the plain of snakes A Mexican journey

Review by Booklist Review

Theroux, with his impeccable portfolio of literary fiction and travelogues, including Deep South (2015), valiantly ventures further South in a quest to gain a deeper understanding of the Mexican side of this fraught moment between our two countries. Brushing aside dire warnings, he zigzags along the U.S.-Mexico border from Tijuana/San Ysidro to Brownsville/Matamoros. He drives solo along the old Camino Real, braving detours along dirt tracks, sheer drop-offs, and scary encounters with traffic cops through the Mexican interior from Reynosa/McAllen through Monterey and San Luis Potosí, with extended stays in Mexico City, Oaxaca, and San Cristóbal de las Casas. Theroux mines every encounter for its uniquely human story, making friends with erudite and everyday people from those who make mezcal to those who make history. Artfully describing landscapes, he meticulously provides comprehensive historical context at every pueblo, monument, or church, creating a textured portrait of a beleaguered country. This is a personal book, and Theroux does not hesitate to articulate his point of view on a number of topics, allowing for no sacred cows ¡cuidado con el realismo mágico! as he unapologetically takes into consideration context, anecdotal evidence, and his on-the-road experiences to arrive at his prescription for improving the Mexican situation.--Sara Martinez Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Travel writer Theroux (Deep South) finds a Mexico that's vibrant but shadowed by violence, corruption, and America in this dark-edged but ultimately hopeful travelogue. Theroux shudders at Mexico's soulless northern border cities, their touristy downtowns surrounded by grim factory districts and squalid urban sprawl dotted with Walmarts, their newspapers filled with accounts of drug cartel massacres. In Mexico City he gets shaken down for bribes by predatory policemen, whom many Mexicans fear more than the narcotraficantes. Farther south, though, Theroux's spirits lift in towns that retain their indigenous culture of colorful Day of the Dead festivals, exuberant transgenderism, and close-knit communities-though many locals have moved to the U.S. to find work. (He includes candid conversations with migrants about their travails in America and calls President Trump's immigration policies "barbaric.") Finally, Theroux discovers a virtual paradise at a Zapatista Rebel Autonomous Municipality in Chiapas, where there are no "American products or American influence," and instead "an utter indifference to El Norte." There, he meets Subcomandante Marcos, a "philosopher-leader" whose "flashing" eyes, "sinuous dialectics," and poetic denunciations of neoliberalism he admires, as Theroux relays in perhaps the most starry-eyed passages he has ever written. Theroux's usual excellent mix of vivid reportage-"worshippers crouched on the floor arranging candles... drinking Coca-Cola and ritually burping"-and empathetic rumination is energized by a new spark of political commitment. Armchair travelers will find an astute, familiar guide in Theroux. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

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Review by Library Journal Review

Veteran globetrotter Theroux takes to the road on the U.S. border and into Mexico, traversing the entire length of the U.S.-Mexico border. The author shares his observations of migrants, the ever-present cartels, a protest of mothers who lost their children during another protest, and girls dressed up for their First Holy Communion. Theroux joyfully describes many of his meals. But on a somber note, corruption and lawlessness are crippling. Cartels deal not only in drugs but also human trafficking. Construction is unchecked, and zoning and environmentally fragile areas are ignored, with Walmart one of the worst offenders. Movingly, mothers tell Theroux that they do not want to make a new life in America, they simply hope to earn enough to keep their families together in Mexico. Returning migrants tell him what they miss most about America its cultural diversity, and if they work hard, they can make good money, whereas in Mexico, a person works hard but still earns very little. The author found that Mexicans blame both governments for the border crossing problems that were once less complicated. VERDICT Tourists headed to Mexico and those interested in the current migrant situation will learn a great deal.--Susan G. Baird, formerly with Oak Lawn P.L., IL

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A veteran traveler explores our complex neighbor to the south.Accomplished travel writer and novelist Theroux (Figures in a Landscape: People and Places, 2018, etc.) has been writing about his travels for more than 50 years. Like his previous accounts, this journey, narrated in his usual, easygoing, conversational style, includes countless lovely descriptions of Mexico's landscapes and insights into the country's history and literature, including Mexican magical realism. Being a naturally inquisitive guy, Theroux talks to the people he meets, everywhere and often, because "it is in the nature of travel to collect and value telling anecdotes." This "shifty migrant" chronicles his navigation of cities, towns, and tiny villages on both side of the borderlands, a "front line that sometimes seems a war, at other times an endless game of cat and mouse." Most Mexicans Theroux met "said urgently to me, Be careful.' " He cites harrowing statistics of the violence that occurs near the border. "On their trip through Mexico," he writes, "migrants are brutalized, abducted, or forced to work on Mexican farms, as virtual slaves. In the past decade, 120,000 migrants have disappeared en route, murdered or dead and lost, succumbing to thirst or starvation." The author also discusses NAFTA and how it turned the "Mexican side of the border into a plantation, a stable supply of cheap labor." He writes about the thousands of gallons of water at aid stations destroyed by the border police and his encounters with Mexican police who, with a wink and a nod, accepted bribes for made-up charges. Outside Mexico City, he visited Frida Kahlo's Blue House, a "kind of habitable sculpture." He also experienced a Day of the Dead ceremony and drank homemade mezcal. "I had made friends on the road through the plain of snakes," he writes, "and that had lifted my spirits."Illuminating, literate, and timelya must-read for those interested in what's going on inside Mexico. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Borderlands To the Border: A Perfect Example of Thatness THE MEXICAN BORDER is the edge of the known world, only shadows and danger beyond it, and lurking figures--hungry, criminal, predatory, fanged, fanatical enemies--a malevolent and ungovernable rabble eager to pounce on the unwary traveler. And the Policía Federal officers are diabolical, heavily armed, stubborn and sullen one minute, screaming out of their furious congested faces the next, then extorting you, as they did me.   Send lawyers, guns, and money! Don't go there! You'll die!   But wait--deeper in Mexico (floppy, high-domed sombreros, mariachi music, blatting trumpets, toothy grins) are the safer, salubrious hot spots you can fly to for a week, get hog-whimpering drunk on tequila, fall ill with paralyzing squitters, and come home with a woven poncho or a painted ceramic skull. Also, here and there, sunny dumping grounds for American retirees--a tutti-frutti of grizzled gringos in permanent settlements on the coast and in gated communities and art colonies inland.   Oh, and the fat cats and petrocrats in Mexico City, thirty listed billionaires--including the seventh-richest man in the world, Señor Carlos Slim--who together have more money than every other Mexican combined. But the campesinos in certain states in southern Mexico, such as Oaxaca and Chiapas, in terms of personal income, are poorer than their counterparts in Bangladesh or Kenya, languishing in an air of stagnant melancholy on hillsides without topsoil, but with seasonal outbursts of fantastical masquerade to lighten the severities and stupefactions of village life. Famine victims, desperadoes, and voluptuaries, all more or less occupying the same space, and that vast space--that Mexican landscape--squalid and lush and primal and majestic.   And huge seasonal settlements of torpid, sunburned Canadians, as well as the remnants of fifteen colonies of polygamous Mormons who fled to Mexico from Utah to maintain large harems of docile, bonnet-wearing wives, all of them glowing with sweat in the Chihuahuan Desert, clad in the required layered underwear they call "temple garments." And isolated bands of Old Colony Mennonites speaking Low German in rural Cuauhtémoc and Zacatecas, herding cows and squeezing homegrown milk into semisoft cheese--Chihuahua cheese, or queso menonita , meltable and buttery, very tasty in a Mennonite verenika casserole or bubble bread.   Baja is both swanky and poor, the frontera is owned by the cartels and border rats on both sides, Guerrero state is run by narco gangs, Chiapas is dominated by masked idealistic Zapatistas, and--at the Mexico margins--the spring-breakers, the surfers, the backpackers, the crusty retired people, honeymooners, dropouts, fugitives, gun runners, CIA scumbags and snoops, money launderers, currency smurfers, and--look over there--an old gringo in a car squinting down the road, thinking: Mexico is not a country. Mexico is a world, too much of a mundo to be wholly graspable, but so different from state to state in extreme independence of culture and temperament and cuisine, and in every other aspect of peculiar Mexicanismo, it is a perfect example of thatness.   I was that old gringo. I was driving south in my own car in Mexican sunshine along the straight sloping road through the thinly populated valleys of the Sierra Madre Oriental--the whole craggy spine of Mexico is mountainous. Valleys, spacious and austere, were forested with thousands of single yucca trees, the so-called dragon yucca ( Yucca filifera ) that Mexicans call palma china . I pulled off the road to look closely at them and wrote in my notebook: I cannot explain why, on the empty miles of these roads, I feel young.   And that was when I saw a slender branch twitch on the ground; it lay beneath the yucca in soil like sediment. It moved. It was a snake, a hank of shimmering scales. It began to contract and wrap itself--its smooth and narrow body pulsing in the serpentine peristalsis of threat, brownish, like the gravel and the dust. I stepped back, but it continued slowly to resolve itself into a coil. Not poisonous, I learned later. Not a plumed serpent, not the rearing rattler being gnawed by the wild-eyed eagle in the vivid emblazonment on the Mexican national flag. It was a coachwhip snake, as numerous on this plain as rattlesnakes, of which Mexico has twenty-six species--not to mention, elsewhere, milk snakes, blind snakes, rat snakes, pit vipers, worm-sized garden snakes, and ten-foot-long boa constrictors.   The joy of the open road--joy verging on euphoria. "Behind us lay the whole of America and everything Dean and I had known about life, and life on the road," Kerouac writes of entering Mexico in On the Road . "We had finally found the magic land at the end of the road and we never dreamed the extent of the magic." Excerpted from On the Plain of Snakes: A Mexican Journey by Paul Theroux, Paul Theroux All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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