In Siberia

This was an interesting book! Siberia strikes me as a much more friendly and beautiful place to visit than I formerly believed. The author's side trips by boat and bus and train are very descriptive and entertaining but he seems to meet quite a few depressing people! I found the book to be a "slow" read, the kind of book you can put down and don't rush back to continue, though you do want to know how it ends.
Also, the end wasn't satisfying to my taste. The author could have written a summary of his feelings about the trip and the people and thrown out a bit of hope for this economically ravaged land!
I recommend this book for the fascinating travel narratives but add an asterisk to prepare for the emotional rollercoaster one experiences from the interactions with the inhabitants of that region!!

Beuatiful descriptions, the characters are recognizable. When you read this book you see it all as if you were there. But the information is not all that the book has, it's also a great piece of literature.

I'm not a great fan of Colin Thobrun. His style is dark and often involves too much conversation with people he meets along the way. But this time, though, CT is in a part of the world that is almost lost in time - a place that's perfect for his dark moody style. Some pictures would have made it really memorable. But that's just a minor quibble. This is travel writing from the centre of the wilderness. CT will conjure images that you'll find hard to forget.

The trip begins on a shuddering train journey east to Ekaterinburg, the scene of the Romanov massacre in 1917. After a brief stop, and some musings on their fate, Thubron sets off east on a tour of Siberia and the lands taken over during the great push eastwards and Stalin's purges. Off we go, up and down the great raging rivers, to once-important communities long forgotten by Moscow. How desperate are the lives of people who once took everything for granted and who now have next to nothing. Thubron's dark style is perfect for the characters and mind-sets of post-Soviet Siberia.

We visit Lake Baikal - the world's deepest lake - and Irkutsk, the scene of Russia's gold rush in the 19th century. What a mad place that must have been. There were dancing troupes from around the world, carpet baggers and all manner of adventurers. I bet few, if any readers, know anything about this place and its highly colourful past. We meet mad scientists, mystics and religious nutters (often the same people) and hear the tales of Russian insensitivity towards local ethnic groups. Half the place seems close to destitution. The fate of missionaries who spent twenty years in the wild and frozen east without a single conversion left me morbid, but absolutely riveted.

Finally, Thubron takes us over the edge into a very dark place. The death camps of Northeast Siberia. CT doesn't hold back. Through local guides and interpreters he describes the absolutely awful, tragic death camp butchery at Magadan and Kolyma where temperatures regularly reach 50 below and prisoners often had little more than a hole in the ground for shelter.

I'm sure he'll never forget what he saw and was told as he walked around ghost-ridden huts that once housed screams and tortured innocents.

I'll never forget In Siberia. Brilliant.

Colin Thubron's travel novel "In Siberia" is a great way to escape to a forbidding primitive land, without ever having to go there yourself. This is precisely why I enjoyed reading his book and I think you will also. Mr. Thubron is an exceptional writer and leaves no stone unturned in his quest to discover the mysteries of Siberia. The tale is spun around his encounters with interesting characters hanging on to an imperialist Russia that has long been abandoned, along with commoners that seem to welcome the stranger warmly. He mixes in a bit of cinematic landscape descriptions along with some interesting history lessons. The only problem I had with the book was Mr. Thubron's use of uncommon words that have me baffled to this day. Words such as: glacis, louche, threnody, tarantas, psalteries, chrysalides, coeval, billeted and others left me constantly scrambling for my dictionary, interrupting the flow of the book. Nonetheless, I found the book to be engaging and enjoyable reading while capturing the mystery and otherworldliness of Siberia.

In Siberia was my first exposure to Colin Thurbon and I must say that I found the book quite compelling --it was a wonderful and involving "long flight read" (a very important criterion for me in my life). I haev read quite a bit of and about the Gulag --and the camps --primarily Solzeneichtin (not sure of the spelling) and have been greatly fascinated by the incredible destruction and persecution imposed on the Russian people by Stalin and his cruel despotic regime but this book brought the cold and hopelessness of this vast region a lot closer to me. I look forward to reading other books by Thurbon and have also ordered Valentin Rasputin's book about Siberia as an attempt to grasp more of this subject. I do, however, agree with some of the other customer revierwers that Thurbon could have given more of himself by letting us know more about how he went about planning this trip, who helped him along the way, etc. Now maybe that would ahve taken away from the narrative flow --or maybe that's another book in itself but I felt he was a bit too matter of fact on how he got from one place to another, But saying all that, I enjoyed the book very much and look forward to reading his other travel essays that are still in print.