Travels in Siberia

From Barnes & Noble

Three-fourths of Russia is in Siberia, but most of us think of its vast expanses only as a vague, frigid wasteland. New Yorker journalist and author Ian Frazier (Great Plains; On the Rez; Gone to New York) fills that vacancy with an energetic account of his ultimate road trip into the great unknown. The journey takes this intrepid American into the far reaches of this forbidding hinterland, but also deep into the often bizarre history of the region. Travels in Siberia spotlights Frazier's ability to be remarkably insightful without losing his sharp sense of wit. A dream pass for armchair travelers.

From the Publisher

“[Travels in Siberia is] 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 . . . As he demonstrated in Great Plains, Frazier is the most amiable of obsessives . . . he peels away Russia’s stolid veneer to reveal the quirkiness and humanity beneath . . . 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 . . . [An] endlessly fascinating tale.” —Joshua Hammer, The New York Times Book Review

“Frazier is a sophisticated, intense writer who—Twain-like—uses a deceptive style of naiveté and comic self-deprecation to carry serious perceptions.…Always beautifully written, often very funny, serious, and moving in its cumulative impact.” —The New York Review of Books

“While the hand- and mind-numbing trip through geographic purgatory couldn’t have been a joy, the humor and genuine awe Frazier injects into his depictions are the stuff of a great vicarious vacation. Grade: A-” —Entertainment Weekly

“Frazier is besotted, happy, free, on high alert, drunk with space….He expands to fill it, and his awe is contagious.” —Los Angeles Times

“Siberia provides Frazier with the perfect canvas to paint what may be his masterpiece.” —The Boston Globe

“It’s always easy to figure out whether you should read the latest book by Ian Frazier: If he’s written it, then you’ll want to read it . . . Much more than ‘travel writing,’ [Travels in Siberia] covers memoir, history, literature, politics and more. There are many reasons to love it, including the fantastic ending, possibly the best of any book in recent memory. Travels in Siberia is a masterpiece of nonfiction writing—tragic, bizarre and funny. Once again, the inimitable Frazier has managed to create a genre of his very own.” —Carmela Ciuraru, San Francisco Chronicle

“[Travel writing] . . . is revived by Ian Frazier’s Travels in Siberia, which evinces a passion as profound as Homans’s zeal for dance: Frazier’s ‘Russia-love’ . . . Between excursions to towns like Neudachino (‘Unhappyville’), he ponders a question that has puzzled many a visitor: ‘how Russia can be so great and so horrible simultaneously.’ In exploring this paradox, Frazier describes the physical world with a keen eye . . . Some of his descriptions read like medieval nightmares: the mosquitoes of western Siberia, so numerous that they gather in fierce black clouds; or the feeling of being locked, for almost two days, in a windowless train compartment beneath a ceiling so low that it is impossible to stand. Frazier candidly addresses Siberia’s tragedies and opportunities, even as his narrative offers, like explorer stories of old (crossing the Sahara, hacking through the Congo, landing in Tahiti with Captain Cook), all the thrills of armchair travel.” —Ben Moser, Harper’s

“Ian Frazier, a staff writer for The New Yorker, is a master of nonfiction narrative. As with his previous travel classics Great Plains and On the Rez, Frazier’s Travels in Siberia not only explores the geography of a remote, seemingly barren region, but also illuminates its dark history and resilient spirit. Frazier isn’t just a chronicler—he’s a central character . . . After reading Frazier’s passionate travelogue and history of Siberia, you’ll never again view the region as a big, empty space on a map. Frazier brings Siberia into vivid, monochromatic focus.” —Minneapolis Star-Tribune

Joshua Hammer

…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…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 New York Times

Alan Cooperman

Frazier…took five trips to Siberia and five or six more to western Russia between 1993 and 2009, and he has combined his stories into a rambling travelogue that is entertaining, illuminating and just slightly, charmingly off the deep end in its infatuation with everything about Russia, good and bad.
—The Washington Post

Publishers Weekly

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.)

Library Journal

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

Kirkus Reviews

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 works—read 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 stark—one day, he walked through the ruins of a remote, frozen Soviet-era prison camp and later saw a ballet in St. Petersburg—and the writing is consistently rich.

A dense, challenging, dazzling work that will leave readers exhausted but yearning for more.

The Barnes & Noble Review

The most alchemistic thing a writer can do is take a place you've never been much interested in and turn it into something so alluring you can't bear to turn away. The most generous thing such a writer can do is take you there in a book so you don't have to go yourself.

Both are done with the subject of Siberia by the matchless Ian Frazier (who does not know how to write a disappointing book -- just pick up Great Plains or On the Rez or any one of seven others). If you are already interested in this vast and largely unknown place, then after reading his treatment of it, you are liable to buy a ticket there immediately. He covers many of the reasons you might proceed with caution, but even these are likely to impassion. Like I said: alchemy.

His new book, Travels in Siberia, has the immense sweep of a place that seems unreal -- not a country or a territory, he reminds us, but more like a concept or a literary conceit that nonetheless takes up the northern third of Asia -- and it has the tiny idiosyncratic particulars that make it altogether real; in this it reminds one of a painting by Bosch. Except, in a way, Siberia is a lot weirder.

Still, or maybe because of this, Frazier adores it. Like a lover, his gaze takes in every detail -- Look! her almond eyes! And look! her sweater's hole! -- with equal overspilling enthusiasm. The very idea of Russia has gotten under his skin, and when he actually arrives . . . "No bells or sirens went off as we crossed into Russian airspace. I felt I was in an X-ray machine: a big change had taken place, but silently and invisibly." His explanation of, or rather his explanation of how he cannot explain, his infatuation with this grand, strange country is an emotive tour de force.

The reasons the reader loves Frazier's work are easier to name. For one, there's his irrepressible humor, which arises unexpectedly to provoke outright laughter (on encountering no fewer than five weddings in an afternoon of driving, Frazier notes, "I couldn't tell whether the bridal couples had actually been married on the highway or were just having their receptions there") and displays his credentials as one of our finest comic writers, which he also shows in The New Yorker. For another, there's the way he paints himself winsomely into the corner of the picture; no matter how majestic the scene, there he is down there, winking. For a third, there's his absolute mastery of narrative prose, its rhythmic propulsion and digressive powers. There is little he is not interested in, and little he does not cover (Russian literary history, lunch, purges, landscape, the Revolution, economics, fishing, ballet, the tsars). He is the tour guide who talks your ear off, but who fascinates anyway.

Indeed, when was the last time you heard someone get at the essence of a place just by examining its smell? Frazier made the country more real for me than a whole stack of Kodachrome postcards (or even the author's own pencil drawings, sweet though these are) in describing the Russian national smell as made up of sour milk, diesel, cucumber peel, and several other disparate items. Then there are colors (lots of cement-gray, apparently, and manmade chemical tones), flavors -- berries and mushrooms -- and, overwhelmingly, people's faces, bodies, clothes. This is a book made of textures.

There are some standouts in a work that seems to be all standout (except for some passages of history you may feel guilty for thinking a tad boring, wishing he'd get back to the broken-down-van ride across nine thousand miles, which is the true heart of these pages). One of them is his description of the epic swarms of mosquitoes:

With such astronomical numbers, Siberian mosquitoes have learned to diversify. There are the majority, of course, who just bite you anywhere. Those are your general practitioner mosquitoes, or GPs. Then you have your specialists -- your eye, ear, nose, and throat mosquitoes.

Another is . . . well, just about every vignette of a chance meeting -- and that is all he had, months' worth of daily chance meetings -- with Siberians (also Russians and other foreigners): ". . . the usual Russian Miss Universes, some in really unseasonal outfits, went step-stepping along." He picks only the telling details, lines them up just right, and zing: a comic masterpiece in miniature. Then he repeats the success again and again.

Not that it's all funny. Frazier has a refined taste for the melancholic, too, and Siberia is the station to fill your tank full of that. Lonely roads through lonelier expanses, the long history of breathtaking cruelties, the sense that there is so much space and very few people to care about it; mostly, though, the feeling that in this insular place, so many lives have been launched, ended, then forgotten that it seems saturated with a true existential hopelessness that is somehow heartening in its grandeur: "the blankness of eternity."

This is only nominally a travel book; really, it is a valentine. Although he still did not succeed in making me want to go -- even the most aching love poem does not make you desire the exact subject of its lines, just one of your own -- I am glad. For the real Siberia might pale next to the enrapturing lands seen through the eyes of the lovesick, and genius, Ian Frazier.

--Melissa Holbrook Pierson