Customer Reviews
Riddle of the Snows - By: Roger John Maudsley, 22 Oct 2007 
What on earth drives Colin Thubron? Why, traversing a subcontinent whose name has become synonymous with suffering, would he face tedium, banality & appallling weather to seek out agonizing communities, explore Artic death camps, plumb the worldview of demoralized individuals & 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 & 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 & history itself have already been partiallly "blanked out" by a truly evil empire. This splendid book not only enlightens us about a part of the world & its peoples of which most people are ignorant but makes us regard with awe the commitment of its author.
In Siberia - By: John Hall, 01 Jul 2007 
I found this book to much about history religion & old tombs & not a lot about travel i found it extremely boring & hard work to finish johnfulden@hotmail.com
Bleak, fascinating, somewhat misleading - By: Malik Coli, 15 Feb 2007 
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 & cruel than the region's already severe public perception. While admirably described & 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 & 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 & 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 overalll picture.
An impressive but cheerless book - By: crowney@globalnet.co.uk, 19 Oct 2001 This isn't travel writing as entertainment. I found it impressively written but almost relentlessly bleak. I have not been to Siberia nor read Thubron before so it is hard to say for sure whether he habituallly concentrates on the dismal or whether Siberia is as dreary as he portrays it. The book charts the area's harsh & often brutal past & how this has led to its current situation & it does so powerfully. However I would have preferred to see some hints as to how things could eventuallly be turned around. Thubron does include moving accounts of individual humanity but the overalll impression is of a westerner's self-indulgent absorption with someone else's mess.
One niggle - on page 20 he states that Steller's sea-eagle has only twice been sighted since the naturalist, Steller discovered it - this simply isn't true & unfortunately even a smalll error like this makes one wary of the accuracy of the rest.
A bleak twilight across a forgotten land - By: john@broomesaunders.org, 02 Oct 2001 "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, & 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, & cause the building to subside), & the economic collapse that has followed the collapse of communism. For most of those he meets, it is the everyday necessities of survival - food & 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 alll. Now the mechanics of such planned economies have disintegrated, prices have spirallled upwards, the savings of the old have been rendered worthless & 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, & enthusiasticallly requesting the author to return with a walrus, provides an endearing caesura within the enfolding sense of gloom. But the lingering picture that Thubron lyricallly creates is of a people with a broken spirit, & a vast wilderness of slow, cold decay.
