If this sequel—["The Old Patagonian Express"] must be called that—is not so delightful as "The Great Railway Bazaar," the fault is as much geography's as Theroux's. Europe and Asia are a richer venue for this sort of thing than Latin America, which by contrast lacks character, deep literary and historical associations, and variety. For anyone experienced with Europe, it is desperately boring. Squalor in Mexico is identical to squalor in El Salvador; the ghastly Mexican town Papaloapán is too much like the horrible Costa Rican town Limón, 600 miles farther south. Illiteracy here is like illiteracy there. As Theroux proceeds, things do get worse, but not dramatically worse: "Since leaving the United States," he writes, "I had not seen a dog that wasn't lame, or a woman who wasn't carrying something…." He seems aware that his sequel isn't quite up to the original, alluding to poor Jack Kerouac, fat and 50, trying to re-experience "On the Road" by hitchhiking West many years later. "Times had changed. The lugubrious man reached New Jersey; there he stood for hours in the rain, trying to thumb a ride, until at last he gave up and took a bus home."

Paul Theroux does not give up, although often he is brought close to despair. (p. 1)

Like good conversation, a good travel book consists of two kinds of materials: narrative (including dialogue) and comment. Theroux's comments come in the form of little 300-word essays….

Interesting as these excursions are, Theroux's narrative is better—his rendering of a combined soccer game and riot in San Salvador is superb—and his dialogue is best of all….

[The] finest dialogue of all is Theroux's conversation with Jorge Luis Borges. On his terrible trains Theroux has been solacing himself by reading Boswell's "Life of Johnson."… In Buenos Aires, Theroux is thoroughly primed to play Boswell to Borges's Johnson, and the resulting conversations constitute a delightful climax, a triumphant overflow of civility and intelligence after all the brutality and stupidity. (p. 24)

But except for the Borges episode, the reader gets little relief from the horrors and boredom. He misses the sheer joy of the anomalous, which surfaced frequently in "The Great Railway Bazaar." Here Theroux is exhausted. Outraged by Latin America, he picks quarrels, depicts himself winning arguments, allows his liberal moral superiority to grow strident. He seems to think we have to be told that people should not starve or live in filth. Even though he knows he's doing these things ("I was sick of lecturing people on disorder"), he can't help himself, and sometimes the unpleasant effect threatens the reader's pleasure in Theroux's sharp eye, which is capable of such shrewd perceptions…. (pp. 24-5)

In the former days of the travel book, Greene and Waugh would tour through horrors and make them something other than occasions for mere superior disgust. Their sympathy was wider than Theroux's, their involvement in history was deeper, and perhaps their knowledge of themselves was more profound. Theroux never says of the messes he observes: "That's me." And thus he fails to take us a sufficient distance … into our own brain. That's the ultimate weakness of this otherwise interesting performance: it's morally facile. But it has some wonderful things in it, and the encounter with Borges is alone worth the price of the book. (p. 25)