Early in Part IV of Travels In Siberia, Frazier says, “Any book about Siberia should have cold and prisons in it. I began to think about making a winter journey.” He does more than just think about it –he throws his snowmobiling overalls, long underwear, down coat, and Glacier Extreme boots (“big and clunky as the shoes of Frankenstein’s monster”), among other things, into his suitcase, and he goes! Part IV is his account of the month-long trip. He flies to Vladivostok, and travels from there by various means of transportation to places mostly far to the north of where he went last time.
Of the many pleasures of Frazier’s report – his vivid descriptions of knocking around in dark, frozen cities and villages (Vladivostok, Irkutsk, Ulan-Ude, Ust-Barguzin, Severobaikalsk, Yakutsk, Khandyga, Tyoplyi Kliuch, Topolinoe), a funny parody of “telegraphic style” writing (“Woman had on sweatshirt said TEXAS A&M. When she standing next to me at buffet, I asked if she an Aggie”), a memorable account of his two-hundred-and-thirty mile ice-road trip to Severobaikalsk at the north end of Lake Baikal (“In midafternoon we stopped for lunch and ate our kielbasa, bread, and hot, sugared tea off the Niva’s back bumper. In the wind the food tasted delicious, seasoned with cold and engine exhaust”) – the ones that I enjoyed the most are the quintessentially Frazierian descriptions of what I call “incidentals” – stuff that most travel writers leave out of their accounts, e.g., the time when Frazier and his guide Sergei are just about to leave Ulan-Ude on a bus, and Sergei discovers he’s still carrying the plastic hotel room key card in his pants pocket, and he (Sergei is sixty-one years old) “runs the two-mile round trip on icy streets in just under twenty minutes, and he’s back before the driver has started counting heads and making ready to leave.” Frazier tells Sergei that, “in America no one thinks twice about walking off with those keys.” Sergei replies that, “the woman at the reception desk was very grateful to him because she would have lost her job for not making sure he had returned the key card when he checked out.”
Travels In Siberia is filled with such real-life incidentals. They’re what give the book its Siberian thisness. Another example that comes to mind occurs near the end of Part IV when Frazier is traveling in a minibus with a number of other passengers, including one old fellow who is suffering from a dislocated shoulder. Frazier says, “His fortitude, and the silent contortions of his face every time we went over a bump, made me wince.” Frazier decides to give him some Extra Strength Tylenol Gelcaps. He says, “I shook two into my palm and gave them to the driver and said he should tell his father to take these now. Then I handed him another two and said his father should take these in four hours, per the directions on the bottle.” But due to a language problem, the father gets a double dose of Tylenol. This causes Frazier anxiety for the rest of the trip. He says, “Soon at each bump in the road, the old reindeer herder was swaying forward, swaying back. Sometimes his forehead almost touched the windshield. Sometimes he would slump way down to the side.” But by the time they reached their destination, he looked okay. Frazier says, “both he and his son thanked me with big smiles when we said goodbye. I was glad to have no worse outcome to my attempt at doctoring.” Incidentals like this are what I treasure in Frazier.
The heart of Part IV is Frazier’s visit to a long-abandoned Stalin-era prison camp. His account of this visit was originally published in The New Yorker, August 30, 2010, under the title “On The Prison Highway.” I posted a review here at the time it came out. It’s a powerful piece. Comparing it with the book version, I noticed a couple of slight changes. Describing the labor camp in the magazine piece, Frazier says, “Around it, like a bubble of prehistoric air frozen inside a glacier, a familiar atmosphere of 1954 hung on.” However, in the book, “hung on” is changed to “endured.” Another passage in the magazine article that undergoes subtle amendment is “His [Stalin’s] was the single animating spirit of the place.” In the book, “single” is deleted. I find these glimpses into Frazier’s compositional process interesting. “Hung on” seems to me slightly more tenacious than “endured.” “Single” emphasizes that it is Stalin’s spirit, and Stalin’s spirit alone, that animates the prison camp. Regarding these two changes, I think the magazine version might be just a shade stronger.
Frazier ends Part IV with a wonderful description of what he sees as he and his friend Luda leave St. Petersburg’s Marlinsky Theatre where they have just finished watching a thrilling performance of the ballet Manon. The concluding passage, in its imagery, lyricism, and rhythm, recalls James Joyce’s “snow was general all over Ireland” ending of his great short story “The Dead,” and is just as inspired, if not more so:
Afterward, Luda and I jostled through the remarkably long and slow line of people returning their rented opera glasses, and the equally full line at the coat check, and then we were outside in the cold among dissipating perfumes and faint cigarette smoke, and snow was falling steadily straight down. It was billowing in the streetlights overhead and making cones of the lights of the waiting taxicabs, and as we stood deciding whether to walk or take a cab, snowflakes came to rest among the fibers of fur in her hat. Each flake was small but unbroken, and detailed as a cutout snowflake made in school.
Reading that is pure rapture!
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