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Summary
Summary
A Dazzling Russian travelogue from the bestselling author of Great Plains
In his astonishing new work, Ian Frazier, one of our greatest and most entertaining storytellers, trains his perceptive, generous eye on Siberia, the storied expanse of Asiatic Russia whose grim renown is but one explanation among hundreds for the region's fascinating, enduring appeal. In Travels in Siberia , Frazier reveals Siberia's role in history--its science, economics, and politics--with great passion and enthusiasm, ensuring that we'll never think about it in the same way again.
With great empathy and epic sweep, Frazier tells the stories of Siberia's most famous exiles, from the well-known--Dostoyevsky, Lenin (twice), Stalin (numerous times)--to the lesser known (like Natalie Lopukhin, banished by the empress for copying her dresses) to those who experienced unimaginable suffering in Siberian camps under the Soviet regime, forever immortalized by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago .
Travels in Siberia is also a unique chronicle of Russia since the end of the Soviet Union, a personal account of adventures among Russian friends and acquaintances, and, above all, a unique, captivating, totally Frazierian take on what he calls the "amazingness" of Russia--a country that, for all its tragic history, somehow still manages to be funny. Travels in Siberia will undoubtedly take its place as one of the twenty-first century's indispensable contributions to the travel-writing genre.
Author Notes
Writer and broadcaster Ian Frazier was born in Ohio and educated at Harvard University, where he wrote for the Harvard Lampoon.
After his graduation he joined The New Yorker staff and frequently contributes to The Atlantic Monthly.
His writing collections Dating Your Mom and Coyote V. Acme earned him a Thurber Prize for American Humor. The Great Plains won a 1990 Spur Award for Nonfiction from the Western Writers of America. Frazier has appeared on the National Public Radio Program A Prairie Home Companion and has acted in Smoke and Blue in the Face, both of which are Wayne Wang and Paul Auster films.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Drawn to what he calls "the incomplete grandiosity of Russia, Frazier's extraordinary work combines personal travelogue with in-depth history and gives readers a firsthand account of a place most will never see: Siberia. After 16 years of research, five trips to Siberia and more to western Russia, Frazier (Lamentations of the Father) recounts his obsession with the inhospitable place that doesn't officially exist: "no political or territorial entity has Siberia in its name." From the Mongol hordes that galloped across the steppes to the Soviet labor camps that killed millions, he intersperses the vast region's history with his own visits. Determined to immerse himself in Russian-and particularly Siberian-culture, Frazier embarks on a drive eastward across the tundra in the summer of 2001, accompanied by two guides. Seeing such sites as Irkutsk, the onetime "Paris of Siberia," Frazier and his companions travel 9,000 miles from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific in five weeks and two days, arriving on September 11. Since he hadn't felt Siberia's renowned bone-chilling cold, Frazier returned for a month in March of 2005, this time starting in the Pacific port of Vladivostok and traveling east to west. Part long-gestating love letter, part historical record of a place shrouded in mystery, this is Frazier at his best. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
The peripatetic author of Great Plains (1989) and On the Rez (2000) returns with an energetic, illuminating account of his several trips to Siberia, where his ferocious curiosity roamed the vast, enigmatic area.Veteran New Yorker contributor Frazier (Lamentations of the Father: Essays, 2008, etc.) begins bluntly. "Officially," he writes, "there is no such place as Siberia." It is not a country, nor a province, yet the region bearing the name is extensive, comprising eight time zones. Throughout, the author confesses to a long love affair with Russia, a relationship that has waxed and waned over the decades but in some of its brightest phases sent him back repeatedly to see what few have seen. Here Frazier records several visits: a summer's trip via cantankerous automobile across the entire region, in the company of a couple of local companions; a winter's journey by train and car, during which the car sometimes used frozen waterways for roads; and a return visit to see the effects of the emerging Russian energy industry. He prepared in a fashion familiar to readers of his previous worksread everything he could, talked with anyone who knew anything, planned and schemed and made it happen. He also studied Russian extensively and tried gamely to engage local people he encountered along the way. On the road, he visited local museums and monuments and natural wonders, and he pauses frequently for welcome digressions on the historical background. He camped, fished and ate local delicacies (and indelicacies). Endearingly, he freely admits his inadequacies, fears (during one perilous icy trip he actually composed a farewell message to his family), blunders, dour moods, regrets and loneliness. The contrasts are starkone day, he walked through the ruins of a remote, frozen Soviet-era prison camp and later saw a ballet in St. Petersburgand the writing is consistently rich.A dense, challenging, dazzling work that will leave readers exhausted but yearning for more.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Frazier (Great Plains, 1989; On the Rez, 2000) has long been fascinated by vast, empty spaces and the people who live in them. It's only natural that he is interested in the place that is almost synonymous with nowhere: Siberia. Here he tells of his repeated visits, from a summer trip across the Bering Strait to a winter trip to Novosibirsk; however, the centerpiece of the book is his overland crossing from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean. That's a massive journey, and this is a massive book. He captures the character and particulars of the place but lets us down, somewhat, as a tour guide. The very best travel writers possess physical and mental toughness, but Frazier is often surprisingly timid: he allows his Russian guides to drive past prisons he really wants to stop and see. And when, at the end of the book, he finally visits an abandoned, snow-covered prison camp, he doesn't explore the barracks building because it feels wrong: I was merely a foreign observer. His complaints about the discomforts of the journey occasionally leave us wondering whether he really loves Russia. Still and all, it's an unforgettable and enlightening portrait of a place most of us know very little about.--Graff, Keir Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IAN FRAZIER's "Great Plains," published in 1989, was a tour de force of travel writing: a 25,000-mile jaunt from the Dakotas to Texas that stripped away the region's seemingly bland facade. From Sitting Bull to Bonnie and Clyde to the Clutter family, whose murder was chronicled in Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood," Frazier revisited American archetypes, and in some cases reinvented them. Later, in "On the Rez," he drew on his 20-year friendship with Le War Lance, a beer-swilling Oglala Sioux, to describe life at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. In both books, Frazier's skillful storytelling, acute powers of observation and wry voice captured the soul of the American West. Now Frazier has set his sights on another region of wide-open spaces and violent history: the Russian East. Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he joined some Russian artists he'd met in New York on a trip to Moscow, where he became infected, he writes, with "dread Russia-love." In particular, Frazier was enthralled by Siberia, that vast, forbidding region that stretches across eight time zones, running from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, bordered by Mongolia and China to the south and the Arctic Circle to the north. Frazier learned Russian, immersed himself in the literature and history of the territory, and embarked on more journeys across the taiga and tundra. The result is "Travels in Siberia," an uproarious, sometimes dark yarn filled with dubious meals, broken-down vehicles, abandoned slave-labor camps and ubiquitous statues of Lenin - "On the Road" meets "The Gulag Archipelago." "For most people, Siberia is not the place itself but a figure of speech," Frazier remarks at the beginning of the book: a metaphor for cold, remoteness and exile. (The Russian word Sibir derives from two Turkic words roughly translated as "marshy wilderness.") Turning metaphor into reality, Frazier made the first of several exploratory trips via Nome, the Alaskan port a hundred miles south of the Arctic Circle - and a short hop from Siberia across the Bering Strait. Arriving in Alaska during the post-Soviet Union diplomatic thaw, Frazier found a flurry of unlikely activity: intrepid Christian missionaries planning snowmobile expeditions across the frozen sea, and an eccentric entrepreneur, the sole member of the Interhemispheric Bering Strait Tunnel and Railroad Group, dreaming of building a 72-mile-long Chunnel across the strait. Touching down in an airport near the Siberian city of Provideniya, Frazier was instantly enraptured by the aromas of "the tea bags, the cucumber peels, the wet cement, the chilly air, the currant jam. . . . The smell of America says, 'Come in and buy.' The smell of Russia says, 'Ladies and gentlemen: Russia!' " Eventually, the Russian scent enticed him back on a far more ambitious adventure: a trans-Siberian journey in a used Renault delivery van. Accompanied by a pair of raffish guides, Sergei and Volodya, Frazier set out from St. Petersburg and traveled east. He forded giant rivers, waded through piles of trash, overnighted in mosquito-plagued campgrounds and met scientists, poets, scuba divers, sales ladies and many, many others whom fate had tossed to the far end of the Russian frontier. The Renault broke down repeatedly, beginning on Day 1, when "the' speedometer needle, which had been fluttering spasmodically, suddenly lay down on the left side of the dial and never moved again." The two guides came to exemplify a very Russian mix of unreliability and resourcefulness, gregariousness and gloom - miraculously repairing the dying van, then disappearing to party all night with the locals. In his many visits, Frazier experienced Siberia's highs and lows. In Tobolsk, the former capital, where Christian knights defeated the Muslim khan in the mid-17th century and put Siberia under the control of the czars, he gazed admiringly at the kreml, a medieval walled city. Perched on a promontory at the confluence of the Tobol and Irtysh Rivers, it "rises skyward like the fabled crossroads of Asiatic caravan traffic that it used to be." On the other hand, the modern industrial city of Omsk, a symbol of Siberian desolation in the post-Soviet era, is little more than "crumbling high-rise apartment buildings, tall roadside weeds, smoky traffic and blowing dust." As he demonstrated in "Great Plains," Frazier is the most amiable of obsessives. From his first encounter with Russian authority - a tense face-off with a boyish-looking border guard at Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow - he peels away Russia's stolid veneer to reveal the quirkiness and humanity beneath. The staring contest ends when the guard breaks into a big smile. "It was a kid's grin," Frazier concludes, "suggesting that we had only been playing a game, and I was now a point down." FRAZIER has the gumption and sense of wonder shared by every great travel writer, from Bruce Chatwin to Redmond O'Hanlon, as well as the ability to make us see how the most trivial or ephemeral detail is part of the essential texture of a place: the variety of TV antennas on Siberian rooftops, the giant bison skull in the paleontology museum of Irkutsk. Frazier never fully explains the nature of his "dread Russia-love," though he clearly sees himself as the spiritual descendant of a long line of Russophiles. These include John Reed, the author of "Ten Days That Shook the World," the classic account of the Russian Revolution, and George Kennan - not the diplomat but the 19th-century American adventurer of the same name, who followed the Siberian Trakt, "Russia's great trans-Asian road," along which goods and prisoners passed for centuries. Frazier suggests that the country's opaqueness has given it a twisted appeal. "Russia is older, crookeder, more obscure," he writes, experiencing a "shiver of patriotism" on a flight back to the United States, just days after 9/11. He's also fascinated by the role Siberia has played in the Russian psyche, recounting in bloody detail the exploits of the Golden Horde, the Mongol conquerors who rode out of the Asian steppe and reduced Kiev and other cities to smoldering ruins strewn with corpses. "Russia can be thought of as an abused country," Frazier notes. "One has to make allowances for her because she was badly mistreated in her childhood by the Mongols." The horror of that conquest, he observes, was enough to turn the attention of the czars to the East, and led to the gradual colonization of Siberia. Most of all, this region has served as a place of exile, an end-of-the-world dumping ground for everyone from petty criminals to visionaries and would-be reformers. Mikhail Bakunin, the anarchist and revolutionary, was one of the few who succeeded in escaping from Siberia's bleak prison camps, embarking on a lengthy transcontinental getaway in 1861 that eventually landed him in London, by way of Yokohama, San Francisco and New York. Dostoyevsky, sentenced to death for anti-czarist activities, was spared at the last minute and sent to serve a term of hard labor in Siberia. Anton Chekhov, who traveled to Sakhalin Island to examine the conditions of internal exile, described a prison cell with a "black crepe" of cockroaches on the walls. Frazier particularly rues the fate of the Decembrists, a group of idealistic young military officers whose exposure to democracy during the Napoleonic Wars inspired a doomed effort to reform the Russian autocracy. They were dispatched to Siberia, where, true to their reputation, they devised a system called artel - sharing stipends from home to ensure that no inmate was ever in need. Ultimately, Frazier seems more interested in exploring Siberia's past than contemplating its future. He barely flicks at its crucial role in gas and oil exploration, which is gradually making this vast territory the prime source of Russia's wealth. And despite his attempts, he never managed to visit the reindeer herders of the far north, whose nomadic lives have come under threat from Gazprom, the Russian gas giant. However, Siberia's richness in metaphor is enough to sustain this endlessly fascinating tale. After a long drive across the frozen wastes of Lake Baikal, Frazier arrived at a long-abandoned prison camp near the town of Topolinoe. The camps along the Topolinskaya Highway were among the most dreaded destinations in Stalin's gulag, the prison system that claimed the lives of more than a million people during the height of the Great Terror in 1937 and 1938. Frazier walked through one of the barracks where inmates starved and froze in the Siberian winter: "This interior offered little to think about besides the limitless periods of suffering that had been crossed off here, and the unquiet rest these bunks had held." As always, Frazier locates the apt historical anecdote that captures the horror with precision. He tells the story of two child prisoners who were given a pair of guard-dog puppies to raise, then struggled to find names for them: "The poverty of their surroundings had stripped their imaginations bare. Finally they chose names from common objects they saw every day. They named one puppy Ladle and the other Pail." Ian Frazier peels away Russia's stolid veneer to reveal the quirkiness and humanity beneath. Joshua Hammer, a former Newsweek bureau chief, is a freelance foreign correspondent. He is writing a book about German colonialism in southern Africa.
Library Journal Review
Frazier, a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, himself narrates this fascinating travelog (originally excerpted in that magazine) that is chock-full of history, commentary, and his love for the grand, unrealized greatness of modern Russia. His observations derive from a cross-country trip he took one summer with two Russian guides and an only somewhat reliable van and are infused with historical context and everyday details. The audio's 16-hour length feels appropriate, given the time and space needed even to scratch the surface of the vastness of Asiatic Russia. A sprawling, enthusiastic glimpse of a land that is so much more than cold and ice. Recommended for fans of Frazier's national best seller Great Plains (1989) as well as for those interested in books on Russia, history, and travel. [The Farrar hc was "highly recommended" for "history buffs, armchair travelers, and lovers of a good essay," LJ 8/10.-Ed.]-J. Sara Paulk, Wythe-Grayson Regional Lib., Independence, VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.