Product Description

Documents Daniel Kalder's travels in the bizarre and mysterious worlds of Russia's ethnic republics.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #38750 in Books
• Published on: 2007-02-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

About the Author
'Embracing hunger, hallucinations and shit hotels, Kalder has written a brilliantly funny travel book that questions the essence of exploration and the nature of tourism.' Esquire Daniel Kalder was born in Dunfermline and lives in Moscow. Lost Cosmonaut is his first book.

Customer Reviews

Making great the bad places
Did you know there was a Buddhist republic in Europe? And a desert for that matter? Or a pagan republic? Russia stretches from Eastern Europe to Alaska and contains many semi-autonomous republics - they have their own presidents, their own TV stations, their own heroes and legends and, of course, their own corruption, brutality, and cities dedicated to chess. They just don't have tourists.

Kalder sets out as an 'anti-tourist' visiting these undesirable places and casting a realistic eye over them and their prospects; yet the same eye also contains a deep empathy towards these people and their invisible countries. Kalder's black humour carries the book from history to personal encounter (or non-encounter) with ease, and his revelations broaden out the view well beyond four republics you've never heard of.

Kalder states at the beginning that 'travel rarely broadens the mind', and travel books even more rarely do so. But this one does, brilliantly.

Nowhere Man
File under "eccentric travel". Kalder, an expatriot Scot living in Russia, decides to visit a few of the more out-of-the-way European Russian Republics, and finds well, not a lot really apart from a lot of empty steppe, crumbling concrete apartment blocks, bad hotels and the remnants of some of the more obscure Asiatic races to have wandered into Europe over the centuries.

Kalder describes himself as an "anti-tourist", in search of the opposite of the kind of thing that would normally attract visitors; scenery, history, good food, weather etc., and he certainly finds it in these out of the way places. By the end of the book he wasn't really sure why he'd made these journeys, and neither was I, but he's done us all a service in locating those exotic destinations that you really don't want go to, and it's an entertaining read.

Two stars for effort
Two stars for effort, because I realise that writing a book must be a difficult, demanding process for the writer, no matter what the end product looks like. Three stars deducted because the end product is incredibly disappointing.

The reviews here were so divided that I decided to go with my gut instinct, which was to read it - what a mistake that proved to be. Looking at the reviews again, I almost get the feeling that the positive reviews here were written by Kalder's friends - or maybe even himself.

As others have mentioned, the book does indeed have its moments, but overall I would have to call this the Emperor's New Clothes of travel writing, with the writer trying to con the reader with pointless amblings of dubious veracity that ultimately deliver nothing. He even tries to pull the same con job with his photographs, which he presents under some concocted off-beat/nihilistic notion of being "anti-photos", but in the end are simply bad pictures that display no talent, no insight, no perspective, no humour. In a country such as Russia, with such a richness of photographic potential (and I don't mean pretty churches), this is just pathetic.

On top of this, the writer simply comes across as a highly unpleasant person - and perhaps he deserves some praise for making no effort whatsover to conceal this. He is a self-confessed cheapskate, poorly informed, obnoxious, incredibly immature, insensitive and very abrasive, and clearly considers himself vastly superior to all around him. I could think of no worse travelling companion. If you nevertheless wish to ignore the negative reviews here - as I did - be aware that this is the kind of person you will be travelling with for 250 pages. Really horrible.