- Paperback: 278 pages
- Publisher: Chatto and Windus; Second Issue edition (7 Oct 1999)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 1856197980
- ISBN-13: 978-1856197984
- Product Dimensions: 23.4 x 16 x 3 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
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Amazon Bestsellers Rank:
771,043 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #19 in Books > History > Countries & Regions > Asia > Central Asia > Siberia
- #31 in Books > Travel & Holiday > Countries & Regions > Asia > Russia > Siberia
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More About the Author
Product Description
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
Product Description
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.
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First Sentence
The ice-fields are crossed for ever by a man in chains. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
The ice-fields are crossed for ever by a man in chains. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A bleak twilight across a forgotten land,
By john@broomesaunders.org (Oxford, England) - See all my reviews
This review is from: In Siberia (Paperback)
"In Siberia" is Thubron's painstakingly bleak account of a journey across the cold, oddly unknown region of Siberia. He begins his assessment of post-Soviet Russia at the Ural Mountains, and travels slowly west, following broadly the route of the trans-Siberian railway. His account is one of enduring struggle, against both the cold (in Dudinka, where the River Yenisei meets the Arctic Ocean, houses must be build on concrete pillars, otherwise the heat exerted by the foundations will melt the permafrost that lingers just a few feet beneath the ground, and cause the building to subside), and the economic collapse that has followed the collapse of communism. For most of those he meets, it is the everyday necessities of survival - food and warmth - that form the focus of their lives.In parts, one can sense a fond yearning for the days of the Soviet Republic - when the collective farms functioned properly, with working tractors, to produce food for all. Now the mechanics of such planned economies have disintegrated, prices have spiralled upwards, the savings of the old have been rendered worthless and the young have little enthusiasm, other than to leave. Despite this, some do still find space to find hope, perhaps in the renaissance of forgotten religions, or perhaps simply in some strained, optimistic view of the future. Throughout the book the shadow of the Gulag, the Soviet labour camp, lingers. Throughout Stalin's reign, criminals, political opponents, or simply those that were deemed to be a threat, were sent to the bleak wastes of Siberia for imprisonment. In the mines, inland of Magadan, on the Pacific coast, nobody lasted long; Thubron seems to touch upon suffering of the millions who died with a sense of quiet bleakness, rather like the snowy, barely living landscape in which they died. This is not a book to read to cheer oneself up. True, the old Shaman, Kunga-Boo, playing wildly on his tambour, and enthusiastically requesting the author to return with a walrus, provides an endearing caesura within the enfolding sense of gloom. But the lingering picture that Thubron lyrically creates is of a people with a broken spirit, and a vast wilderness of slow, cold decay.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
superior travel writing,
By A Customer
This review is from: In Siberia (Paperback)
His writing is often so lovely I turn the page back just to read it again (doesn't happen often). Sometimes it wants to be poetic but is oblique and impenetrable. But the man can write far, far better than most. I spent three months in Siberia and I recognise all his characters, he conveys the desperation of the place beautifully, the shabbiness, but also the pride and the physical dimensions. Towards the end, the travel writing framework got wearying - not another priest drinking in a hut - but then he delivers the final chapter, which is superb and shocking and serene, and he is forgiven the slight tediousness or tiredness leading up to it. And for once, a travel writer who speaks the language of the country he/she is visiting, and doesn't pretend to by neglecting to mention translators. All in all, readable and memorable and a far cry from sunday supplement travel puffery.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Outstandingly well-written, spell-binding.,
By A Customer
This review is from: In Siberia (Paperback)
This is an extraordinary book. Once again, Colin Thubron manages to unlock a hitherto unknown part of the world to his readers. His eloquence makes one feel as if one was there with him. His description of the Stalin Gulags was so horrific that it was almost unbearable to read. The cruelty of the country and the desperate sadness - or perhaps confusion - of the people is tangible. One aches for them and with them. No book could better bring to life this country which embodies so much of the history of the once mighty Soviet Union and which was once locked away from the rest of the world. It is a must.
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