Travels in Siberia by Ian FrazierFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010

Siberia: you think “big,” you think “cold,” you think “isolation,” maybe you think “exile” or “gulag.” You probably don’t think “place I’d like to travel across by car,” but Ian Frazier did. He actually took five trips to Siberia over the course of sixteen years, not just the trans-Siberian drive he writes about in the third part of this book, and his interest in and engagement with it, and with Russia more generally, are infectious.

But let’s start with some background: as Frazier puts it at the start of his book: “Officially, there is no such place as Siberia. No political or territorial entity has Siberia as its name. In atlases, the word “Siberia” hovers across the northern third of Asia unconnected to any place in particular, as if designating a zone or a condition; it seems to show through like a watermark on the page” (3.) Still, Siberia has its physical boundaries, accepted even if not official: and, as Frazier points out, it’s really really big. I mean, of course it is: just look at the book’s map. But numbers help to make it more concrete: Siberia has eight time zones; Siberia accounts for one-twelfth of the land of the entire planet. The Trans-Siberian railway is 5,771 miles long: “In other words, if it were twenty-one miles longer, it would be exactly twice as long as Interstate 80 from New Jersey to California” (9).

Frazier’s stories of his various trips to Siberia are wonderfully told: full of interesting detail and often very funny. Frazier writes well about the experience of travel: being excited, being enamored of a place, but also sometimes being overwhelmed, exhausted, cranky, and a bit at the mercy of your hosts. I loved this:

The next morning all had been prepared for me to take a banya—a Russian steam bath. The bathhouse I was directed to had once been the hull of a wooden fishing boat. Soon after I went in and sat down and started sweating, it caught fire. I wondered if the heavy smoke coming through the wood paneling on the ceiling was part of the program. Then I heard shouts, grabbed a towel, stepped outside, and saw flames leaping up and a workman in overalls prying at the roof boards with a long crowbar. Katya appeared and told me to run and jump in the lake, as one traditionally does after a banya. I ran, jumped, and nearly seized up from the shock. Baikal is quite cold. (36-37)

Frazier doesn’t just write about his trips to Siberia, though. He writes about Russian history, and about other places he sees while en route to or preparing for Siberia: the junk-littered empty lots of Nome, Alaska, or the Museum of the Arctic and the Antarctic in St. Petersburg, with its dioramas and maps, or Peterhof, which he describes like this:

Snow was falling hard as I crossed the spacious sculpture garden, bigger than several parade grounds, that leads to the main palace at Peterhof. The snowstorm made the palace look even more looming and impressive, its ranks of tall windows sketching the principles of classical architecture like an old drypoint drawing. I might have imagined that the gardens and the fountains with their statuary and the palace façade in the background, snow-blurred as they were, exactly resembled what a visitor would have seen on a winter day almost three hundred years before; but the quick blue-white flashes from tourists’ cameras here and there restored the view to the present tense. (158-159)

He’s funny and lyrical by turns: some passages about the temperamental van in which he rode across Siberia nearly made me laugh out loud (at one point, it catches fire); other passages, like the ones about the beauty of Lake Baikal, the clarity of its water, how it glitters in the moonlight, made me want to slow down and savor them. Like Russia itself, this book is broad and full of many and varied things: sable running along the road, cities and trains and train stations, swamps, ice roads across lakes in winter, oil fields, reindeer herders, ballets, mosquitoes, and more still than that, and Frazier makes his observations of it all into a really compelling book.