Travels in Siberia, by Ian Frazier (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010)
Frazier's account of several trips he made through Russian Siberia, from the 90s to 2005. He confesses that he is "infected with a love of Russia". The main narrative of the book is about an interesting six week road trip in a Renault van with two Russian guides, Sergei, the chief guide, and Volodya. There's a fair amount of humor as Frazier deals with Siberian roads, restrooms, mosquitos, beautiful Russian women in stiletto heels, and trash. Frazier himself is a somewhat nervous type who at first seems an unlikely candidate to rough it for three thousand miles in a small van, and his hopeless confrontations with the increasingly irritated and bossy Sergei give us some moments of real hilarity. Driving through the endless taiga forest day after day can drive even the most amiable companions a little crazy.
Along the way, Frazier meets businessmen, academics, local historians. They're impressive, energetic people. The academicians seem well informed and current. But aside from them, I was struck by the ramshackle nature of most peoples' lives and the haphazard way things worked. Decaying cities and towns, horrible roads that sometimes ended and then resumed, a bureaucracy that depended on bribes. He noted some isolated improvement on his return trips after Russian oil money had been spread around.
A big part of the pleasure of reading this book is the Russian and Siberian history he introduces. From Ghengis Khan to the Decembrist revolutionaries to Stalin's Gulag, Frazier demonstrates that Russian history is for him a consuming passion. Surprising for what is basically a book of amiable travel writing: there are twenty five pages of notes and a seven page bibliography!
The book has a serious vein running through it. Frazier is interested in the past of a place, particularly an unhappy, tragic past, and how that past is treated in the present. Siberia has been a place of exile, suffering, and mass death. Not surprisingly, Frazier finds Russians more comfortable talking about the two hundred year old Decembrist revolution as opposed to the sixty year old Gulag work camps (which are now hard to find empty hulks).
Although I haven't been to Russia, I hope to go someday. Having read and loved Solzhenitsyin, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Dostoyevsky, I can understand his Russia love.
