In Ian Frazier’s hefty new Travels in Siberia, one comes to feel affection for the Russians struggling there, if not the author. But the real protagonist of this travel book/history/memoir is the land itself.
As Frazier demonstrates, its vastness, riches, hard history, and potential future are hard to grasp. The people who inhabit Siberia, whom Frazier encounters on numerous trips there over two decades, are also often difficult to fathom, seeming extra-human in their endurance, inventiveness, and, not infrequently, indifference.
Along the way we get glimpses of the gulags, the history of the sable trade, the recent rise of the mammoth-ivory trade, Siberia’s extensive mineral wealth, including diamonds, and its oil and natural gas riches, upon which Europe is now largely dependent.
We visit it in summer, when mosquitoes and other insects rule, and in winter, when rivers turn to literal highways for motor vehicles.
While Frazier is an able guide with help from knowledgeable Russians, he seems not that good of a traveling companion—at times humorless, self-involved, timid, priggish, and lacking the joie de vivre of his homegrown fellow travelers and local Siberians.
Nonetheless his Travels in Siberia is a startling and compelling read, urging me to learn more about the mystical land.
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Russia and the Russian people have been on my mind since finishing David Benioff’s heart-stopping novel, “City of Thieves,” that kept me awake at night. What Rick says about the Russians “seeming extra-human in their endurance, inventiveness, and, not infrequently, indifference,” is all in Benioff’s slim novel, but there is much much more. I was so convinced that Benioff was a new native Russian master of literature, I tried to find out if he was born there. He wasn’t, but he’s still a master.