TRAVELS IN SIBERIA BY IAN FRAZIER
A review by Ben Crair,
Deputy News Editor, The Daily Beast
In 1989, Ian Frazier established himself as the foremost chronicler of America’s big and empty spaces with Great Plain, his on-the-ground account of America’s flyover space. His new book ups the ante: The land Frazier covers in Travels in Siberia “takes up one-twelfth of all the land on earth,” plains so vast that people used to say they exceeded the total surface area of the moon.
Frazier manages these enormous landscapes by rooting out their smallest, most intimate parts and personalities. He devotes paragraphs to the things most travelers overlook: a roadside memorial for Stalin’s victims among a heap of trash; a real-estate agent in Alaska who dreams of a New Year’s cruise across the Bering Strait; a harpoon in the ground of an unpopulated tundra, commemorating lost whalers.
His narrative is aided by some of the old saws that travel writers have always turned to for comic relief: a lemon of a car and two stern travel guides who lose plenty in translation. Still, the narrative sags sometimes beneath the weight of the history Frazier piles on it. At times, he struggles to integrate this history into the travelogue and so the reader is left with long historical chapters written in Frazier’s associative style, which can be a bit hard to wrap your head around.
But don’t let this deter you from picking up Travels in Siberia. It’s filled with Frazier’s comic observations—temperatures so cold that “if the wind caught me square in the face it almost flash-froze my eye”; a Russian consonant so difficult to speak that “I had to sit down hard in a chair as I pronounced it.” Frazier’s book is free of grand pronouncements. “In actual travel situations, however, I’ve noticed that moments of soaring consciousness are rare,” he writes. Instead Frazier builds from the ground up; the emptiness at the heart of Russia has rarely felt so cozy.
Great New Reads
by The Daily Beast
www.dailybeast.com
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