A review by michaelnlibrarian
White Fever: A Journey to the Frozen Heart of Siberia, by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Jacek Hugo-Bader
4.0
I found this in the travel (travelogue) section of a local Barnes & Noble. I was immediately attracted by the idea of someone writing about a cross-Siberia drive in a Russian jeep.
For an American reader of travel books, there are several things to understand about this particular travelogue. For one thing, the author is a Polish journalist (who is my age - he gave himself this trip for his 50th birthday, five years ago) and it was written in Polish originally for a Polish audience. It does not appear to have been adapted for an English-speaking audience, just translated. Depending on how much you know about Russian already, this may be good or it may be bad - the author is pretty clearly assuming the reader knows quite a bit about Russia already so a lot of the kind of "this is Russia today" context that is provided in travel books typically for American audiences at least is missing.
What one eventually realizes is that he isn't much interested in Russians but in the minority peoples of Siberia, from the Evenks to the Tuvans. The "White Death" of the title is a reference to the state that these aboriginal people end up in when they drink. Like many Poles, he doesn't exactly have an overall positive view of Russians (as opposed to the many other nationalities in the Russian Federation). Towards the end, having interacted with Russians mostly closely in connection with his cranky Russian jeep, he writes, "That's what upsets me most about the Russians - their reluctance to do anything in advance, except what's absolutely necessary, their languid way of waiting for disaster to happen before getting on with anything." One can understand this fairly broadly, not just in reference to mechanical devices.
Also, contrary to my expectation, only part of this book is a traditional chronological travel narrative - most of it are chapters devoted to a particular topics, such as the closed city Arzamas-16, or a visit with the Vissarionite sect (which was just shown in photographs on the New Yorker site), and several chapters about the native peoples that Jacek describes as dying out. The realization that this was not, in fact, a travel narrative caused me to put this down for several days, but I finally took it back up and finished it.
One blurb on the back says, "a witty, inspiring account of an odyssey into the frozen heart of a dying continent, sparkling with vignettes of human endurance. That is a pretty positive spin on what is, overall, a very depressing string of stories for the most part. Most of the so-called "vignettes of human endurance" don't sound like things are going to work out well in the long run - or in most cases, even the short run. The lives of most of the people he meets, who are mostly just regular folks and not those in positions of power or authority, sound awful.
For an American reader of travel books, there are several things to understand about this particular travelogue. For one thing, the author is a Polish journalist (who is my age - he gave himself this trip for his 50th birthday, five years ago) and it was written in Polish originally for a Polish audience. It does not appear to have been adapted for an English-speaking audience, just translated. Depending on how much you know about Russian already, this may be good or it may be bad - the author is pretty clearly assuming the reader knows quite a bit about Russia already so a lot of the kind of "this is Russia today" context that is provided in travel books typically for American audiences at least is missing.
What one eventually realizes is that he isn't much interested in Russians but in the minority peoples of Siberia, from the Evenks to the Tuvans. The "White Death" of the title is a reference to the state that these aboriginal people end up in when they drink. Like many Poles, he doesn't exactly have an overall positive view of Russians (as opposed to the many other nationalities in the Russian Federation). Towards the end, having interacted with Russians mostly closely in connection with his cranky Russian jeep, he writes, "That's what upsets me most about the Russians - their reluctance to do anything in advance, except what's absolutely necessary, their languid way of waiting for disaster to happen before getting on with anything." One can understand this fairly broadly, not just in reference to mechanical devices.
Also, contrary to my expectation, only part of this book is a traditional chronological travel narrative - most of it are chapters devoted to a particular topics, such as the closed city Arzamas-16, or a visit with the Vissarionite sect (which was just shown in photographs on the New Yorker site), and several chapters about the native peoples that Jacek describes as dying out. The realization that this was not, in fact, a travel narrative caused me to put this down for several days, but I finally took it back up and finished it.
One blurb on the back says, "a witty, inspiring account of an odyssey into the frozen heart of a dying continent, sparkling with vignettes of human endurance. That is a pretty positive spin on what is, overall, a very depressing string of stories for the most part. Most of the so-called "vignettes of human endurance" don't sound like things are going to work out well in the long run - or in most cases, even the short run. The lives of most of the people he meets, who are mostly just regular folks and not those in positions of power or authority, sound awful.