"Figures in the Landscape" by Paul Theroux: book tip with Elke Heidenreich

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Elke Heidenreich, author and book critic

With more than 30 books, the American Paul Theroux is one of the most successful travel writers in the world.

And I was very happy when Hoffmann and Campe published this book a few months ago, »Figures in the Landscape«.

These are his most beautiful and interesting travel reports from many decades.

Summarized here.

Paul Theroux has visited famous people like Liz Taylor or Michael Jackson or Robin Williams.

But he also traveled in the footsteps of famous travel writers such as Paul Bowles and Joseph Conrad.

He always has that very special look.

He's just not a tourist.

He's not someone who drives somewhere like us and then occupies a lounger with a towel for two weeks, although I don't really do that either, but he got involved with the country and the people.

Sometimes he just went somewhere without a plan and wanted to see how it was there?

We live, eat something, how is politics.

He said the true traveler must be humble, patient, alone, anonymous and vigilant.

And this is him!

And you can see that in every report in this book.

Once he describes how he sits in the helicopter with Liz Taylor and drives to the Neverland ranch, to this miserable Michael Jackson, who lives there completely lonely.

And a very nice chapter is a walk through a park with Robin Williams, where people recognize him and are happy.

Robin Williams, and he's also quite happy and fun in his new marriage.

And he got over his depression.

That was 1999. And we know, 15 years later, that depression caught up with him.

And then Robin Williams took his own life after all.

All such impressive stories are in this wonderful book.

And as I was reading that, I remembered reading another travel book when I was a young, silly schoolgirl.

And that was our cult book back then: Jack Kerouac »Unterwegs« or »On the Road«.

And I did... it came to me because Jack Kerouac would have been 100 years old on March 12th.

We had never read anything like it, breathless, written quickly, like jazz music.

And we all wanted to get away from home somehow.

He was friends with Allen Ginsberg, with William S. Burroughs.

Those were our heroes that we read when we wanted to live another life, which some did, following in his footsteps and failing quite a bit.

Jack Kerouac, he's criss-crossed America with his friend Neal Cassidy, whose name is Dean Moriarty in the book, hitchhiking, on freight trains,

in old rickety cars.

He wrote restlessly, all the time emotionally subjective, about what he saw in America.

Last but not least, the book was the basis for the film Easy Rider with Jack Nicholson, Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper.

And he wrote, because he was too impatient to keep turning a new sheet of paper, on a scroll that went on and on.

It was a roll of the kind that was used for telex machines back then, telex paper.

And that reel was auctioned at Christie's in 2011 for two and a half million dollars.

You have to imagine.

which went on endlessly.

It was a roll of the kind that was used for telex machines back then, telex paper.

And that reel was auctioned at Christie's in 2011 for two and a half million dollars.

You have to imagine.

which went on endlessly.

It was a roll of the kind that was used for telex machines back then, telex paper.

And that reel was auctioned at Christie's in 2011 for two and a half million dollars.

You have to imagine.

That was the Bible for us back then, because we wanted to live like him.

But we couldn't live like that.

And this book is still abridged.

Well, the original is a lot wilder.

This entire roll has now been typed up and is also available from Rowohlt in the new version.

I took a look.

Stupidly, I don't have them with me because I remembered about Kerouac too late.

Has mighty lengths.

You don't really need it.

I like the old version much better.

And as I was re-reading that, a passage came to mind from Paul Theroux's accounts of his visit to Graham Greene.

Because Kerouac ultimately perished because of his fame.

He died at the age of 47, but he had already experienced everything and had three marriages behind him.

By the way, at his funeral was Bob Dylan,

recognized the importance and talents of people very early on.

And he actually died out of this fame that he suddenly had with »On the Road«.

And Paul Theroux writes that during his conversation with Graham Greene, he talked to him about how the publishers and the whole book industry started to burn authors so much, dragging them everywhere, sending them to bookstores and to readings and on television.

And that's not good for an author.

I dont know.

I am part of this machine myself.

I go to readings, I sit here and talk to them about books.

I don't know if it's good, if it would be different, better if you withdrew.

Everyone will probably have to decide that for themselves.

But these two books are very interesting to read.

They are two extraordinary travel books,

And now let's see what's on the bestseller list and how the authors who are on it, on the Spiegel bestseller list, not a bestseller list, but a bestseller list.

It's a big difference.

By the way, the list of the best: They are often a bit snooty and say what is a bestseller, what sells well can't be good.

I think that's stupid, because what's the point of writing books if you don't want to sell them?

And if you don't want people to read them.

Well, I'm actually a friend of the bestseller lists and we see them now, the Spiegel bestseller list:

On the ten - the previous week's five: "The Nights of the Plague" by Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk.

A fictional island kingdom around 1900, the plague breaks out.

And suddenly Muslims and Christians accuse each other of having introduced the pathogen.

Sound familiar?

The topicality resonates here - and yet it is about the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

The actor Edgar Selge finds himself two places lower on the nine again this week: With »Have you finally found us«, his autobiographical novel, he also convinces his fans as an author.

What it's like to be twelve years old and grow up with a prison warden as a father – you'll know after reading it.

And somewhere in the top ten she is actually every week: Juli Zeh, who comes from Brandenburg by choice, reviews the Corona period in her modern homeland novel - and sends a city dweller to confront herself and the people of Brandenburg: "About people" this week on the eight.

Climbing another three places to seven is an equally enduring list novel: "Stay away from Gretchen" by Susanne Abel tells the story of the well-known news presenter Tom, who deals with his mother's past for the first time - and stirs up a lot of hidden things .

At least there is a new entry this week, in sixth place: »The Girl with the Dragon« by the French actress and director Laetitia Colombani.

Here the Indian girl Lalita, known from Colombani's bestselling novel »The Braid«, gets her own story.

A self-defence group for women plays a role in this.

In fifth place we look into the abysses of Frankfurt's literary milieu.

There the program director of a publishing house is found dead.

The case for investigator duo Pia Kirchhoff and Oliver von Bodenstein is finished.

The tenth Taunus thriller by Nele Neuhaus, »In Eternal Friendship«, is once again a bestseller.

Carsten Henn's "The Book Walker" strolls leisurely on the four.

Not a thriller, but a feel-good novel about the enterprising bookseller Carl Christian Kollhoff, who runs a literary delivery service for special customers.

Climbed one place from four to three: The enfant terrible of contemporary literature, Michel Houellebecq.

In his new novel »Vernichten«, he furiously describes what it looks like in France shortly before the presidential elections in 2027 and what role a viral video plays in it.

And: No movement on the first two places:

Bernhard Schlink's »The Granddaughter« remains in second place.

The novel by the international bestselling author and lawyer tells an East-West story: After the sudden death of his wife Birgit, Kaspar investigates her secret.

What he finds is a granddaughter - among East German right-wing extremists.

Just as consistent as the two this week is the one: Yasmina Reza's »Serge«.

The playwright is known for plays like »The God of Carnage«.

»Serge« is also about the nitty gritty: after the death of their mother, three children of Holocaust survivors go on a kind of »identity-finding trip« to Auschwitz.

The excursion of the Popper siblings alternates between comedy and tragedy in the usual Reza manner.