It would take a thousand-word essay for me to fully capture my feelings towards Thubron's opus. Suffice to say that the nearer I got to the last page, the Iess I wanted to finish the book, and the pace of my reading slowed down significantly in the last 50 pages. I wanted to relish every word, savour every turn of phrase, linger over every poignant description and captured mood.Sadly, the book is now done but the impression that it made on me will last a long, long time. If there is such a thing as "spirit of place", then Thubron comes closer to tapping into that tragic spirit - of Siberia, and more broadly of Russia - than any other work I have read recently. It's not an easy task, simply because the staggering scale of Russia's twentieth-century suffering nearly defies belief, let alone description. Was it 20 million people that died in the gulag? Or was it 60 million? How do millions of human beings become mere rounding errors? To penetrate into the very heart of that desolation - into snowfields of death with names like Kolyma and Vorkuta - and to describe it adequately - not just adequately, but in prose of great beauty and power, for Thubron is a master stylist - is an achievement that was previously given only to the Russian greats themselves - Solzhenitsyn, Shalamov, Mandelstam, Ginzburg. Not many outsiders have visited the physical and psychic extremities that Thubron does in this book, and very few ever will. *It all starts in a juddering train climbing painfully over the Ural mountains that separate Europe from Asia. This is the legendary Trans-Siberian Railway that threads through the southern half of Siberia like a fragile, stubborn thread, all of seven and a half thousand kilometres in length. In the very first chapter, Thubron sets the tone, of undaunted journeying into Russia's remotest, darkest heart. After making pitstops in Yekaterinburg, where the last Czar and his family met their end, and Tyumen, he hitchhikes to the distant village of Pokrovskoye where the monk Rasputin was born. Again and again, he invents such solutions when forced by necessity. He cadges rides on the road in a variety of vehicles, bunks with hospitable strangers in ramshackle apartments or fairy-tale cottages - and once, for a long stretch, in a tiny hospital in a dying native village on the Yenisei river near the Arctic Circle. Chapter 2, Heart Attack, is a flight to the far north, to Vorkuta - a name synonymous even today with harsh labour and frozen death. He will go to the gulag again at the end. Chapter 3 is a trip to Novosibirsk, largest of Siberia's cities, and to an extraordinary place just to its south: Akademgorodok, the science city that Khrushchev built, which at the time of Thubron's telling - the shiftless years at the end of the 90s between Yeltsin and Putin - was bleeding funds and scientists in equal measure. (I've read since that Akademgorodok is coming up again in the world, funded in part by Western R&D money). Chapter 4 is a journey to the beautiful mystical borderlands of the Altai mountains, heartland of the ancient Scythians and meeting-place of four national boundaries - Kazakhstan, Russia, Mongolia, China. In this remote steppe, he tracks down a Tuvan shaman, one of the last of his kind. A sign of how acutely Thubron is attuned to the country and its people is the amount of attention he devotes to faith in Russia, or its absence. Whether it's the nascent Orthodox revival in 90s Russia, the extreme isolation of the Old Believer sects, pagan animism among the native tribes, or the soulless atheism sponsored by the Soviet state, he finds time for all of them, finds current day adherents and talks to them, explores their outer and inner lives. Once he visits Shushenskoye, the village of Lenin's exile in Czarist times. The bitterness of broken belief among the village's elderly custodians is a theme that will come back again and again throughout the book - how the end of communism left several generations stranded and bereft in an ideological vessel that capsized without leaving so much as a replacement lifeboat in sight. In Chapter 5, I found the physical and emotional centre of this book: a ferry journey down the mighty Yenisei, 2000 km from Krasnoyarsk to distant Dudinka beyond the Arctic Circle, where all the houses stand on stilts sunk into the permafrost. This leisurely ride, from human civilization to the outer reaches of polar emptiness, put me in mind of a similar epic journey that I read about just a few weeks ago - Negley Farson's trip down the great Volga in the 1920s that took him all the way from Soviet Moscow to the wild mountains of the Caucasus. It is on the return journey up the Yenisei that Thubron comes unstuck, becomes marooned in the native Entsy village of Potalovo for weeks on end, living in a settlement full of drunks, holed up for the most part in its hospital. At times, he even loses patience with the fatalistic, and fatal, way of native life. But never for too long. He is the most humane of observers, and has all the time in the world for the follies and failures of his fellow man. Chapter 6 is a journey to Lake Baikal, largest, oldest and deepest of all the world's lakes. Even here, he hunts down a crumbling remnant of the gulag, a mica mine shut down in the 1930s when artificial substitutes to the insulating material were invented. The Buddhism of Buryatia province and the classical grace of the city of Irkutsk follow. The latter became the home of the exiled nobles who led the failed Decembrist uprising of 1825. *And then the encounters with the Old Believers. Thubron tracks them down with characteristic determination, these folks who split from the reforming Orthodox Church back in the 1600s over the weighty question of whether to use TWO fingers or THREE when making the Sign of the Cross. And then suffered the most grievous hardships, willingly, as a result of their adherence to the old beliefs and customs. This is an extraordinary passage - in a book that is fucking BRISTLING with extraordinary passages - and as luck would have it, the very morning after the night I read this chapter, I came across the unbelievable story of the Old Believer Karp Lykov who retreated with his family from civilization in 1936 into the remote reaches of the Abakan river, and lived in the forest utterly innocent of all contact with human beings for 42 years, until their clearing was discovered by chance from a helicopter overhead carrying a team of geologists in the summer of 1978. They never even knew that something called the Second World War had come and gone. It was the most amazing story, and came hot on the heels of my first learning about them in Thubron's book. YouTube is still packed full of videos about the Lykov family, and especially about Agafia Lykova, the youngest daughter of the family and the sole survivor who still lives the life of a hermit in the forest where her reclusive family raised her.What is the one thing that Thubron missed out on? To my mind, it is the Tunguska event, the meteor that crashed into the Siberian taiga a hundred years ago, and gave rise among other things to an episode of the X-Files! He covers the A to Z of Siberia, but I do wish he had found time for this too. No one could have explored that mystery better, gotten closer to its source than Thubron. He also gives rather short shrift to the Civil War, just a single page on the death of Kolchak. A few more pages about the Czech legions, for example, might have been interesting. The rest of the book is a slow drift down the Amur railway to the Pacific far east, to Khabarovsk, to Yakutia - mammoths! - and finally to Magadan itself. Varlam Shalamov wrote his gulag classic "Kolyma Tales" about life, and more often death, in the labour camps of Magadan, and Thubron in his mood of dogged daring goes to places that no Westerner saw before: the frozen fields of mass death, the radioactive uranium mines that even today kill reindeer, the white mountains in the distance that look flat and one-dimensional, "like the veins of giant leaves swept against the sky." The book that starts with the startling line - "The ice-fields are crossed for ever by a man in chains" - ends then in those self-same ice-fields, but on a note of hope, in the company of a man whose grandfather was sentenced to five years in the gulag for telling an off-hand joke about Stalin. "I wish my grandfather had lived on. He loved a good joke, and people can joke about anything now. We've still got that. Jokes." And standing on a snowy mountain stained with numberless deaths, the man starts laughing. Thubron leaves us stranded there. If Conrad or Graham Greene had lived to see the end of communism, this is the kind of book they would have been proud to have written. This is Thubron's answer to Heart of Darkness, replacing the close, humid forests of the Congo with the vast, white emptiness of Siberia. These five stars are the easiest I'll ever give out. This review's crossed 1500 words. Read the book.
In Siberia was not only a trip across the vast frozen land mass in the company of Colin Thubron, for me it was an evocative text conjuring memories of my childhood. When I was young (in the 1980s... I know I am so old and it was so long ago) my Dad worked in Siberia. Between 1987 and 1996 he would disappear for months at a time into the unimaginable vastness of Siberia. In those days there was limited mobile phone technology and no email. GPS was a military thing, not something for civilians. So where was he? Normally we didn't get to find out until he returned to Moscow where he would pay up to $50 for a five minute phone call - usually calling from the Novotel - to let us know he was ok. When he returned he usually brought people with him. Russians and Siberians who worked in the medical profession and so dinner times were peppered with Russian dialogue and strange food. Inky black beluga caviare, sunset orange balls of Salmon caviare which popped like eyeballs when you bit into them, pickles, salted goods and vodka. The most memorable bottle was shaped like a war head with glassy body and blood red nose-cone. Appropriately it was called "bomb vodka".Thubron's books brought back all the names of my Father's travels. Omsk, Magadan, the Sea of Okhosk, Lake Baikal, Novosibirsk, Novokuznetsk were place names that formed a common part of my child hood vocabulary. I read this book with interest as I have already experienced this world through one man's eyes and his descriptions and now Thubron provided me with yet another view. Both accounts agree on one key issue - the vastness. How can you describe one sixth of the worlds landmass? When you are in it you cannot see the borders or the ends of it and so it seems no larger than any other outdoor space you can experience in the UK or America. Yet you can sense it because the people are defined by their isolation and the rawness of the landscape. In a landscape where millions were sent as punishment with thoughts that they would never return, the people who live there by choice represent dignity and resilience in the face of political, financial and geographical adversity.Thubron's fluency in Russian and his ability to blend in provide him with the advantage of a shared language which means that people opened up to him. He carefully relays their opinions, describes cultures and social groups (not always impartially but what travel writer can be impartial when they are so immersed in their subject matter?). From politics to the border control, poverty to archaeology and communism to shamanism, Thubron has a good long look at the Siberia shaped, or sometimes carved and butchered by the rise and fall of Communism. The closest I got to experiencing this country first hand was the smell of wood smoke and shashlik on my Dads impressive Russian fur hat and holding the Whale bone earrings from a trader at the Sea of Okhosk and the piece of Woolly Mammoth tusk retrieved during a mining operation in Magadan. Nesting dolls and lacquer boxes smelling of pine are the closest I've got to the Taiga but thanks to Thubron's book I feel like I've gotten another glimpse of a world which I never visited but which shaped my childhood. I still hope to go to Magadan one day to see a city made beautiful by death.
What do You think about In Siberia (2015)?
I now have an established pattern with Thubron. I get really jazzed to read his book, mostly based on the locations he visits. Then I start the book and think, "This man is a genius, but I would never want to actually travel with him. He's constantly miserable." As I edge toward the end of the book, I very nearly hate him. I finish the book and give it three stars, not four, because he casts a pall of pessimism so heavy that it affects my mood when I'm not even reading. Then, a few months later, after I've lived with and settled into my memories of the book and realize how much I learned and how evocative his writing is, I go back and switch it to four stars. I expect the same will happen here.
—Gina
Co wyróżnia relację Thubrona? Empatia - on współczuje ludziom, czuje żal i złość, czuje smutek wtedy, gdy bohaterowie jego reportażu nie czują już nic, nie obwiniają nikogo, wypierają ze świadomości, że ktoś tu popełnił błąd. To generalnie smutna i mroczna książka o tym jak zmarnowano potencjał Syberii, o niespełnionych marzeniach stworzenia lepszego świata, o tym jak rzeczywistość zweryfikowała nadzieję na postęp, a także o tym jak zdegradowano środowisko tych dziewiczych terenów. Klęska komunizmu w pigułce.
—Przemek Skoczyński
What did we like? The depth of research Thubron had carried out, and the ease with which he brought it to bear. The gripping vignettes, and the remarkable characters. The black horror of the region he exposed, which, for one at least, exerted a masochistic fascination. The way in which – unlike many other writers in the genre – he did not patronise or ridicule the people he met. The fact that he was not judgmental. The taut, episodic structure, without introduction or conclusion. The intriguing historical links to the world we had considered in Alan Clarke’s “Barbarossa” – such as the removal of Russian factories to the East, and the reminder that Stalin’s appetite for the heartless murder of millions matched that of Hitler.However, the style of Thubron’s language provoked debate. For some the book was a difficult read. Not that it was badly written – every word was carefully chosen, and every image precise. But the language was densely packed and concentrated. His language did not have the rhythm and flow of a master of descriptive prose such as Capote. He also had the habit of shifting from character to character without signalling the change, forcing the reader to concentrate hard to find out what he was referring to.Others felt they must have been reading a different book. For them he always grabbed their attention. His opening sentences were particularly well-crafted, plunging the reader into the scene, and the closing sentences of episodes were equally well honed .Moreover, some of us felt there was a more active agenda lurking beneath the presentation he orchestrated. In one of his very few asides he noted that the Russians were always happiest when they had faith, and the world he presented was one in which their faith in communism had been shattered, and in which it was very difficult to find a new faith. For some religion was returning to fill the vacuum (and how intriguing it was to discover that Marshal Zhukov had carried concealed icons with him on the battlefield). Others were even trying to return to paganism. But for many only alcohol and despair filled the vacuum....This is an extract from a review at http://monthlybookgroup.wordpress.com/. Our reviews are also to be found at http://monthlybookgroup.blogspot.com/
—Monthly Book Group
