The Consul's File

Paul Theroux

Houghton Mifflin, 1977 - Fiction - 209 pages

"Post-colonial Malaysia is Theroux territory, charted fictionally in Saint Jack and brilliantly revisited in his best-selling travel book, The Great Railway Bazaar. The Consul’s File is a journey with a young American diplomat to a “bachelor post” at the uneasy frontier where civilization meets jungle. The Consul records is stint in Ayer Hitam through a sequence of tales in which he is both observer and participant. As his intimacy with the town grows, so does his motley cast of Asians and exiles: the son of a Cantonese café owner, dreaming of A Fulbright one day and a movie contract the next; Margaret Harbottle, writer of travelogues and freeloader extraordinary; an American ingénue dubed “The Flower of Malaysia,” who flirts with local mores and gets more than she bargained for." -- Book jacket.

Contents

• The Consuls File: 1
• Dependent Wife: 7
• White Christmas: 19

About the author

Paul Edward Theroux was born on April 10, 1941 in Medford, Massachusetts and is an acclaimed travel writer. After attending the University of Massachusetts Amherst he joined the Peace Corps and taught in Malawi from 1963 to 1965. He also taught in Uganda at Makerere University and in Singapore at the University of Singapore. Although Theroux has also written travel books in general and about various modes of transport, his name is synonymous with the literature of train travel. Theroux's 1975 best-seller, The Great Railway Bazaar, takes the reader through Asia, while his second book about train travel, The Old Patagonian Express (1979), describes his trip from Boston to the tip of South America. His third contribution to the railway travel genre, Riding the Iron Rooster: By Train Through China, won the Thomas Cook Prize for best literary travel book in 1989. His literary output also includes novels, books for children, short stories, articles, and poetry. His novels include Picture Palace (1978), which won the Whitbread Award and The Mosquito Coast (1981), which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Theroux is a fellow of both the British Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Geographic Society. His title Lower River made The New York Times Best Seller List for 2012. Currently his 2015 book, Deep South, is a bestseller.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Consul's File
• Author: Paul Theroux
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin, 1977
• Original from: the University of Michigan
• Digitized: Dec 15, 2006
• ISBN: 0395253993, 9780395253991
• Length: 209 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / General