In Siberia - Colin Thubron
At 58, Thubron had already lived 10 years longer than the average Siberian when he made
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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
...; notions of honour; ideas on warfare. Culture in its broadest and most pervasive wandered this road.
If Thubron had a purpose when he set out on this eight-month journey, it was almost certainly to examine that aspect of the road. Following the route, he says, "is to follow a ghost. It flows through the heart of Asia but it has officially vanished, leaving behind it the pattern of its restlessness: counterfeit borders, unmapped peoples.
Eight months is some commitment in the modern realms of travel. When Wilfred Thesiger or Gertrude Bell or the legendary Lawrence went a-wandering, it was accepted that an expedition would take years, but the world has shrunk since then. Or so we think. One of the clear messages from Thubron's latest adventures is that in some places, the shrinkage is barely noticeable.
The author compares his short...
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Advantages: Great cultural and historical perspectives Disadvantages: Incessant grumbling of author becomes tiresome
...that all Tibetans are descended from a sexually insatiable ogress who had six children after copulating with a submissive monkey. It is just a pretty tale, of course; but looking at this [Tibetan] man it was easy to see how the myth might have originated."
So, who is this book for? There is certainly a hardcore of Theroux fans who eagerly devour his books but I think he is an acquired taste. There is none of the waxing lyrical about beautiful maidens or pretty blossom trees you might expect in a travel book about China. The landscapes painted are, on the whole, grim and uninviting. I found very little here to encourage me to think about traveling to China and yet I know that a different author, ColinThubron or Dervla Murphy perhaps, might portray China in a much more sympathetic and less critical light. While I believe that it is the role...
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Advantages: Interesting account of an unconventional childhood Disadvantages: Lacks feeling and emotion
...To be honest, if you have never heard of Dervla Murphy, the chances of "Wheels within Wheels" joining your library are slim. I think it's the kind of book that would get overlooked by browsers but as well as being of interest to fans of the author, I think it is similar to recent bestsellers in which the authors look back on unusual and often tragic childhoods.
Dervla Murphy has spent the last forty-odd years traveling the world, sometimes with her daughter Rachel, but usually solo on a bicycle. Within the world of travel writing she is very well known and more along the Eric Newby or ColinThubron lines than, say, Bill Bryson. Her first book "Full Tilt" is her account of her first epic journey, on that occasion from Dunkirk to Delhi by bicycle. Since then she has written about adventures in locations including Peru, Siberia, southern...
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13.07.2008
17.05.2005
