Product Description

In the early 80s Colin Thubron wrote a bestselling book about his travels around the Soviet Union in an old Morris Minor. In the late 90s, post Soviet Union, he decided to explore Siberia - this time by truck, by bus, by boat. The result is a wonderfully readable and evocative account of an extraordinary region. He travels through exotic cities and deserted villages, meets nostalgic old Stalinists and aggressive Orthodox churchmen, and generally interweaves Siberia's fascinating history with a vivid description of the place today.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #39176 in Books
• Published on: 2000-09-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

Amazon.co.uk 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
Novelist and travel writer Thubron has written another travel classic to rival his own Behind the Wall and Among the Russians. This time his landscape is Siberia, one of the most forbidding, forgotten places on Earth. The author investigates how this huge part of Russia is coming to terms with the chaos of the capitalist-driven future. The young people of Siberia are increasingly having to choose between staying on and risking starvation or trying to escape the land of mammoths, death camps and golden promise; a land neglected not only by the world but by the rest of Russia itself. Thubron's expansive prose rises to the challenge of the landscape and the author's empathy for the people and his ability to draw out their stories makes a stirring book. It doesn't matter what Thubron is writing about; any reader who knows his work just wants to come along for the ride. (Kirkus UK)

About the Author
Colin Thubron is the author of six novels and a number of bestselling travel books, including Among the Russians and most recently The Lost Heart of Asia - all of them are available in Penguin. He lives in Holland Park, London.

Customer Reviews

Riddle of the Snows
What on earth drives Colin Thubron? Why, traversing a subcontinent whose name has become synonymous with suffering, would he face tedium, banality and appalling weather to seek out agonizing communities, explore Artic death camps, plumb the worldview of demoralized individuals and contemplate remote sites where dramatic events unfolded years, if not millennia, ago? Certainly there is an unrelenting fascination with the mysterious heart of Eurasia, crisscrossed at least three times by the Russian and Chinese-speaking author, but there seems to be more. The intensity of the effort to bear witness to mankind's resistance to inexorable forces sometimes seems like part of a manic attempt to hold back the passage of time itself. Whatever the motivation the result is particularly appropriate when dealing with a place where not only maps, but also human memory and history itself have already been partially "blanked out" by a truly evil empire. This splendid book not only enlightens us about a part of the world and its peoples of which most people are ignorant but makes us regard with awe the commitment of its author.

In Siberia
I found this book to much about history religion and old tombs and not a lot about travel i found it extremely boring and hard work to finish johnfulden@hotmail.com

Bleak, fascinating, somewhat misleading
One has the impression that Thubron wanted to find the bleakest, saddest visions of Siberia. And find them he does, painting a portrait of Siberia as even more harsh and cruel than the region's already severe public perception. While admirably described and very true to reality - his encounter with 'Rasputin' in Pokrovskoe proved almost exactly what happened to me too when I turned up in that village. However, the problem lies in the choices of which bits of Siberia to cover. These choices mean that the reader is not shown the 'other' Siberia - places like Krasnoyarsk or Omsk whose new vibrancy and optimism are the very opposite of the unrelentingly bleak picture that a reader will be given here.
Siberia isn't THAT bad! Indeed to many Russians its pioneer spirit, independent-minded citizens and glorious out-door wildernesses make Siberia more paradise than hell-hole. That doesn't make the book a bad one by any means, but when reading it do bear in mind that you're getting a sellable bundle of selective negativity rather than a real overall picture.