In Siberia - Softcover

Thubron, Colin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1856197980 ISBN 13: 9781856197984

Publisher: Chatto and Windus, 1999

Synopsis

A few years ago it bacame possible for a foreigner to travel Siberia almost at will. This is the account of the author's 15,000-mile journey through this astonishing country, one twelfth of the land surface of the whole earth. He journeyed by train, river and truck among people most damaged by the breakup of the Soviet Union, travelling among Buddhists and animists, radical Christian sects, reactionary Communists and the remnants of a so-called Jewish state; from the site of the last Czar's murder and Rasputin's village, to the ice-bound graves of ancient Sythians, to Baikal, deepest and oldest of the world's lakes. This is the story of a people moving through the ruins of Communism into more private, diverse and often stranger worlds.

About this title

Review

At 58, Thubron had already lived 10 years longer than the average Siberian when he made his 15,000 mile trip and was as much a novelty to locals as they were to him. Until 1991, foreigners were only allowed along the Trans-Siberian railway. Now all is open, as Thubron writes: "The exhilaration of freedom never quite left me." In In Siberia he searches for the "core of Siberia"--a difficult quest in a land mass larger than the USA and Europe combined.

Siberia is Russia's wild east--pillaged by the Cossacks for furs, later populated by exiles and prisoners, who diluted the native culture of hunters and Mongol-Turkish nomadic tribes. Thubron travels from unknown town to unknown town, hunting at sunset for shelter. Some of it is as bad as you would fear--endless, uninhabitable, treeless tundra, frozen solid eight months a year. There are ghostly gulag towns like Vorkuta with its smoke stacks, "black detritus", and death camps where prisoners worked 12 hours a day, living in minus 40 until death (usually two weeks).He finds grim broken-down people living only for vodka, freedom having escaped them again. "Scarce jobs and high prices were the new slave masters."

At other times In Siberia is more surprising--the rebirth of Christianity and eager building of monasteries; Mongol shamans; the 2,500,000- year-old mummified remains of a princess; sweaty 85 degree temperatures; Akademogorodok, an abandoned science city where a lone professor experiments with cosmic consciousness.

Like many of the people he meets, Thubron's book is weighed down by history, but it does succeed in quenching the curiosity about that great blank in the Atlas. --Sarah Champion

Review

"I have never made it as far as Siberia, but reading this book makes me feel as if I have actually been there. Thubron weaves his own observations beautifully with the history of this part of the world" (Lorraine Kelly Sunday Express)

"Colin Thubron is in a class of his own in [having] a literary talent for reportage which is both crisp and lyrical" (Scotsman)

"Captivating: a passionately engaged portrait of one of the earth's most mysterious regions...confirms Thubron's place in the pantheon of the writing greats" (Sunday Times)

"There are currently few writers and fewer books capable of transporting a reader to another place as beautifully as Thubron does in this work. It is simply superb" (Observer)

"A profound meditation on how some of the great upheavals of this century touched ordinary lives" (Kazuo Ishiguro Observer, Books of the Year)

Edition details

• Publisher: Chatto and Windus
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1856197980
• ISBN 13: 9781856197984
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 278