SOURCE: Powers, Elizabeth. Review of My Other Life, by Paul Theroux. World Literature Today 71, no. 3 (summer 1997): 590.

In the following review, Powers offers a mixed assessment of My Other Life, which she judges to be alternately “funny” and “off-putting.”

My Other Life limns an artistic trajectory, which may or may not be that of Paul Theroux the chronicler of travel and of foreign places. It begins in the late 1960s in a leprosarium in Africa. The sheer ugliness of many of the people and places in the following pages has its source in Moyo. The lepers, in their fatalism and worldly indifference, are portrayed as parasites living off missionary charity, while the priests and nuns are themselves totally without vanity and without charm, indifferent to life beyond their narrow exercise of duty. Likewise the Theroux portrayed here, who is indifferent to real, lived life, slipping into various identities (e...