Nogales opens this audiobook, one town split by a steel fence into a prosperous side and a poor one, filling up with hopeful crossers from the south and with deportees sent back from the north. Paul Theroux starts at that fence and then drives, and nineteen hours and fifty-eight minutes later he has covered the border country, the interior, a language school, a cooking school and a great many conversations with people who had no particular reason to talk to him. Joseph Balderrama reads it. Scale is the argument here: this is the long version of Mexico, taken at the speed of a car.
The Verdict, Briefly
One written response traces the route better than any summary I could write: a Buick, two thousand miles from the Pacific to the Gulf, and a driver crossing back and forth as he goes. That same entry names the ethos the trip runs on, stay longer and travel deeper, which describes both the method and its cost. Theroux is not passing through for a chapter and then filing. The itinerary is the argument, and the argument is that a country you drive slowly through will hand you things a country you fly over never will. Whether you find that persuasive depends almost entirely on how much company you want.
Numbers on the listing do not hold up, so deal with them first. The counter claims a single rating and prints a 4.4 above it. Add the five written grades together and they total twenty-two, which over five entries is 4.4 exactly. The average has been computed from the visible column while the counter reads some other pool, and whatever that pool is, it did not produce the number printed beside it. Read the 4.4 as a verdict from five people who wrote at length, which is the more useful figure anyway, and disregard the count entirely.
Weaving is the right word for how the book moves, and one enthusiastic entry puts it in almost those terms: a personal narrative braided with analysis of culture and history. A stretch of driving gives way to a passage about what the fence does to the towns on either side of it, then to a classroom, then back behind the wheel. History keeps arriving attached to somebody standing in front of him, which is why the country becomes legible in a way no policy briefing manages. Twenty hours is a long stretch to give one place, and the reward is proportion instead of headlines.
Enrollment is the detail that tells you how this trip was run. Theroux signs up for local language classes and cooking classes, which puts him in rooms where he is a student and not a visiting authority, and the deserts south of the Arizona line get the same even handling: charm noted, the border patrol looming to the north noted, discord from within noted, none of it flattened into a thesis. The effect on a listener is cumulative. No single hour announces itself, and somewhere past the midpoint the country has acquired a shape that a shorter trip could not have produced.
Before You Commit to On the Plain of Snakes
Not everyone finds the voice easy to sit with. A four-star entry calls the writing solid and then says the author comes across as a bit full of himself, a charge worth weighing before you commit twenty hours to a first-person account by a man with an opinion about everything he sees. The same response flags the literary detours, long passages citing other writers on Mexico and Mexican writers themselves, and admits to skipping them outright. On the page you can skip. In audio you cannot skim without losing your place, so those detours will either be the best hour of your week or the reason you start checking the time remaining.
Disappointment turns up too, and from a long-standing admirer. A three-star response opens by calling Theroux a favorite author and this book a let-down, on the grounds that the border chapters express shock at violence and degradation that has been documented for decades. That is a complaint about stance and not about craft, and it is the sharpest thing on the page, because it asks whether a veteran traveler discovering a well-covered story counts as reporting. Come to this one already informed about the border and you should budget some patience for the first stretch.
Edition details deserve a glance as well. The description on this listing is written in British English, spellings and all, while every written response beneath it was filed in the United States. Nothing about the recording is compromised by that mismatch, and it does tell you the sales text was drafted for one market and the audience answering it belongs to another, which is worth knowing if you expect the framing to match your own news cycle. Runtime is nineteen hours and fifty-eight minutes, the sort of number that decides whether a book becomes a project or stays a maybe.
Who Will Get the Most From It
Long-form travel writing is the natural home for this one, and the audience is anyone who likes the slow, cranky, observational mode in which the writer's mood counts as data. It suits listeners who want Mexico handed to them as a country and not as a policy problem, and who can accept that a book about a border will spend real time on cruelty without offering a remedy. Anyone learning the language gets an extra layer from the school material. The commitment is real, so decide up front whether you want a companion for a month.
Enthusiasm on the page is worth quoting before you go: one response calls this another gem and recommends it at the risk of gaining empathy, knowledge and enlightenment, then mentions the photographs, a reminder that the print edition carries images the recording cannot. Skip it if you want a guidebook, a tight thesis, or a writer whose personality stays out of the way, since none of those are on offer. The wrong listener will hear twenty hours of one man's opinions about a country he is driving through, and that description is not unfair.
Questions Listeners Ask
Is this audiobook a good place to start with Paul Theroux?
It works as a starting point, though it is not the gentlest one available. The book runs almost twenty hours and gives its first long stretch to border violence and deportation, so a newcomer meets this author at his bleakest. Anyone who wants the traveling and the humor first should begin elsewhere.
Can this audiobook be taken in short sittings?
Yes, more easily than the runtime suggests. The structure is a sequence of places and encounters instead of a plot, so a twenty-minute stretch usually holds one town, one conversation or one argument. Losing the thread costs you very little, which is the practical advantage of travel writing in audio.
