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Travels in Siberia, by Ian Frazier
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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.
- Sales Rank: #889833 in Books
- Published on: 2010-10-12
- Released on: 2010-10-12
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.50" h x 1.75" w x 6.50" l, 1.80 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 529 pages
Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best Books of the Month, October 2010: Over 20 years after Great Plains, one of the more oddly wonderful books of the last few decades, Ian Frazier takes us to another territory worthy of his expansive curiosity: the vast eastern stretches of Russia known as Siberia. Through the stories of Russian friends, Frazier was drawn there in the early '90s, and he soon fell in love with the country--an "embarrassing" sort of middle-aged love, an involuntary infection. What he loves is its tragedy and its humor, its stoic practicality and its near-insanity: he calls it "the greatest horrible country in the world," and Siberia is its swampy, often-frozen, and strikingly empty backyard. He took five trips there over the next dozen or so years, and Travels in Siberia is based on those journeys. But as in Great Plains, when Frazier travels he follows his own curiosity through time as well as space, telling stories of the Mongols and the Decembrists with the same amused and empathetic eye he brings to his own traveling companions. His curiosity quickly becomes yours, as does his affection for this immense and grudgingly hospitable land. --Tom Nissley
From Booklist
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. --Keir Graff
Review
“[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
“Siberia provides Frazier the perfect canvas to paint what may be his masterpiece. Frazier told the story of the Great Plains (his eponymous 1989 bestseller) and Native American life (“On the Rez,’’ 2000) by mixing history, reportage, and memoir, but what makes him special is his brilliant, if quirky sense of humor . . . When confronted with a place as serious as Siberia, it helps to have Frazier’s comic leavening . . . Travels in Siberia is a typically sprawling Frazier book. Underneath a rich smear of his pen-and-ink sketches and his research (Frazier is an unusual travel writer in that not only is he very funny, but he is very serious, and he offers nearly 40 pages worth of endnotes and a bibliography of scores of books on Siberia) are the threads of five trips he took to the region since 1993. From the Alaska side, he hopscotched around Chukotka’s Chukchi Peninsula. For a satirist like Frazier, it was like shooting fish in a barrel, and he restrained himself, only rarely cracking a joke. “Chukchi girls dancing with a telephone lineman from California is a sight seen almost never, and then not more than once” — or noting that the two stuffed bears displayed in the Anchorage airport were killed by dentists . . . He then explores the question of why there are no historical markers or memorials at the Siberian gulag, as there are at some other sites of atrocity like Dachau and Auschwitz. The terrible crimes are still incompletely acknowledged, he argues, because the camps embodied Stalin and “the world has not yet decided what to say about Stalin.” It is a simple point but a powerful one and like much of the book, both Frazier’s images and his insights about the camps linger long after you stop shivering.” —James Zug, 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
Most helpful customer reviews
80 of 88 people found the following review helpful.
Great historical journey through Siberia
By Downtown Pearl
i read two excerpts from this book in the New Yorker Magazine a summer or two ago and couldn't tear myself away. It's such an adventure. If you've ever read one of the great Russian novels or studied world history at all you already have an historical vision filed away in your head and this book brings it all back, richly. The spirit in which Frazier traveled to research this book and because he's written it so well you feel like a fly on his shoulder throughout the journey. i'm so happy the book is finally published, i've been waiting a long time for it. Highly recommended!
119 of 135 people found the following review helpful.
Gorgeously written, but flawed American viewpoint
By Just lookin'
I'm going to write my review without biasing myself by reading the others.
I lived and worked in Siberian and the Russian Far East for several years in the 1990s. Frazier has always been one of my favorite authors; he is king of detail. "On the Rez" was a phenomenal book. Missing my second home, Russia, I snatched up Travels in Siberia the instant it became available.
I'm going to start with the limitations of this book:
1. East of Chita and Yakutia, the locals uniformly call their land the "Russian Far East." They do not call it Siberia, any more than people from Idaho or California call their land the Midwest. Just like Americans have the Midwest and the West, the Russians have the corresponding landlocked Siberia and the coastal Far East. It perpetuates Westerners' geographic misnaming of the region.
2. Leaving the history of Siberia's Indigenous peoples out of the book. This is the most egregious oversight of this book, and it's particularly perplexing given Frazier's history researching and writing "On the Rez." Can you imagine an author writing on the history and the experience of the Dakotas without mentioning the Sioux? This book manages to paint Siberia and the Russian Far East as the historic battleground of Russians and the Mongols, without mentioning the couple dozen tribes - of Asian, Turkish, or European descent - that migrated to, lived in, and defined Siberia for centuries before either the Russians or the Mongols arrived. In a few of these regions, Indigenous peoples still outnumber Russians, and it is still common to hear the native languages spoken on the streets or in government offices. Frazier writes about two visits to the Republic of Buryatia without clarifying that Buryatians are Indigenous descendents of the Mongols. He then visits a bit with the Even peoples in Yakutia, but again fails to relate any information about their history, although the book has some history on the Russian colonization of the region.
3. Frazier entered Siberia with the notion that it is All About Gulags; that is a typical American lens/misperception. Siberia is a whole lot of things, and Siberians do not, nor did they ever, think of their land as Prison Land, any more than Californians currently obsess about Japanese internment camps in California. In both places the gulags are a sad and horrible history but they are far from defining the place. If you lived in Siberia for a year and listened to Russian conversation, you would never know there are any prisons there. Another stereotype of Siberia that Frazier failed to question, and ended up just perpetuating.
4. Siberia and the Far East are the very most beautiful (a) in nature and all the wilderness parks, which Frazier never seems to get off the highway to see!; and (b) in private homes, where Russians and other natives fully open their hearts and are your best friends for life. Frazier is more exposed to the (much harsher) "public life" of Russia, the train toilets and the public litter, than to its wonderful private life. Russians often said to me, "I've visited America, and it's boring there." What they often mean is that Russians, and particularly those who live east of the Urals, are a very social, hospitable, warm, fun people who know how to have a good time. Frazier for whatever reason barely gets a peak at this. And he writes about forests, but never really gets a look at how gorgeous they are in Siberia, because he is always sort of on the main drag, pushed on by two hosts from St. Petersburg who only want to drive faster rather than slowing down and actually seeing anything.
That said, this book is wonderfully written, has riveting detail, and has some truly brilliant insights into both the Russian psyche and the land that Frazier visited. Worth reading.
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
More History Book Than Travelogue
By P Magnum
Ian Frazier's Travels In Siberia is a lengthy tome about not just Mr. Frazier's travels in Russia but a history of the country including Genghis Khan, the Decembrists, Stalin, Lenin and everyone in between. The book is extremely well written and you can feel Mr. Frazier's genuine love of the country coming through, but I felt a little shorted by the passages on his actual travels in Siberia. The first thing you think about when you think of Siberia is that it is a cold desolate place, but on his first trip he goes in the summer. While he does rectify this by going back and travelling through Siberia in the winter that trip seems more like an afterthought in the book. On his first trip, he spends much of his time sitting back in the camp his two travelling companions set up in various campgrounds, roadsides, etc. while they go out and experience the towns. It would have felt more like a travel book if Mr. Frazier had joined the two on their excursions into town and written about the locals instead of the many museums he visited. That being said, Mr. Frazier deserves credit for an extremely well written book especially his story of how he ended his first journey through Siberia on 9/11/01 and his resulting trip back to his home in New Jersey. It was quite compelling and the most heartfelt portion of the book.
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