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Any journey with Alexander Theroux is an education. Possessed of a razor-sharpand hyperliterate mind, he stands beside Thomas Pynchon as one of the sharpestcultural commentators of our time. So when he decided to accompany his wife —the artist Sarah Son-Theroux — on her Fulbright Scholarship to Estonia, it occasionedthis penetrating examination of a country that, for many, seems alien anddistanced from the modern world.
For Theroux, the country and its people become a puzzle. His fascination withtheir language, manners, and legacy of occupation and subordination lead him toa revelatory examination of Estonia's peculiar place in European history. All thewhile, his trademark acrobatic allusions, quotations, and digressions — which takeus from Hamlet through Jean Cocteau to Married… with Children — render histravels as much internal and psychical as they are external and physical. Throughthese obsessive references to Western culture, we come to appreciate how insular the country has become, yet also marvelat its fierce individuality and preternatural beauty — such is the skill of Theroux's gaze.
This travelogue of his nine months abroad also brims with anecdotes of Theroux's encounters with Estonian peopleand — in some of its most bitterly comedic episodes — his fellow Americans whom he at times feels more alienated fromthan the frosty, humorless Europeans.
Estonia: A Ramble Through the Periphery is as biting and satirical as it is witty and urbane; as curious and lyrical as itis brash and irreverent. It marks a new highlight in an already stellar career and a book that continues Fantagraphics'exceptional line of prose works.
