January 17, 2022 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Joshua Yaffa’s “The Great Thaw.” It’s about the impact of permafrost thaw on climate change. What I like about it is that it’s set in Siberia. That’s where two-thirds of the world’s permafrost is located. Yaffa visits Yakutia, in northeastern Siberia. His opening paragraph is terrific:

Flying over Yakutia, in northeastern Russia, I watched the dark shades of the boreal forest blend with patches of soft, lightly colored grass. I was strapped to a hard metal seat inside the cabin of an Antonov-2, a single-¬engine biplane, known in the Soviet era as a kukuruznik, or corn-crop duster. The plane rumbled upward, climbing above a horizon of larch and pine, and lakes the color of mud. It was impossible to tell through the Antonov’s dusty porthole, but below me the ground was breathing, or, rather, exhaling.

A bit later, he follows that up with this beauty:

At the moment, though, I was mainly concerned with the stomach-turning lurches the plane was making as it descended in a tight spiral. We had dropped to a few hundred feet above the ground so that Maximov’s colleague, a thirty-three-year-old researcher named Roman Petrov, could take the final sample, a low-altitude carbon snapshot. The plane shook like a souped-up go-kart. Petrov held his stomach and buried his face in a plastic bag. Then I did the same. When we finally landed, on a grass-covered airstrip, I staggered out of the cabin, still queasy. Maximov poured some Cognac into a plastic cup. A long sip later, I found that the spinning in my head had slowed, and the ground under me again took on the feeling of reassuring firmness—even though, as I knew, what seemed like terra firma was closer to a big squishy piece of rotting chicken.

That detail of the plastic cupful of Cognac is excellent; it totally hooked me on the piece. I also relished its first-person perspective:

To get a sense of how permafrost thaw is changing the landscape, I took a drive out of Yakutsk with Nikolay Basharin, a thirty-two-year-old researcher at the Permafrost Institute. 

Three days later, I caught a flight on a propeller plane leaving Yakutsk for Chersky, a speck of a town on the Kolyma River, near the delta where it empties into the East Siberian Sea. 

One day in Chersky, I visited a site along the river managed by a German research team from the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry. 

Earlier in the summer, I visited Yamal, a peninsula that juts into the Kara Sea like a crooked finger.

One day in Chersky, Zimov showed me a site where he had tried to mimic the result of a fire on the permafrost. 

Zimov and I were each carrying a long metal probe, the permafrost scientist’s classic field tool. 

Yaffa is in Ian Frazier country. Frazier wrote one of my all-time favourite books – Travels in Siberia (2010), excerpts of which appeared in The New Yorker (August 3, 10 & 17, 2010). In that book, Frazier visits the Academy of Sciences headquarters in Yakutsk, where he views, among other things, a mammoth leg, “with its well-preserved long hair.” Yaffa, in his piece, also views (and actually handles) a mammoth leg. His mammoth leg is in Yakutsk’s Mammoth Museum, so I don’t think it’s the same leg that Frazier saw, but you never know. How many intact mammoth legs can there be? In my favourite scene in “The Great Thaw,” Yaffa writes,

Fedorov brought me to a large walk-in freezer, where lumps of flesh and fur were piled on metal shelves; the crescent bend of a tusk was unmistakable. As Fedorov explained, these mammoth remains, dug up across Yakutia, were being stored at zero degrees Fahrenheit, awaiting further scientific study. The space was cramped and frigid—so this is what it’s like to be locked in the permafrost, I thought. I picked up a leg that once belonged to the Maly Lyakhovsky mammoth, a thick stump with reddish-brown hair. “Look, its footpad is very well traced,” Fedorov said. “You can see its toenails.”

That “so this is what it’s like to be locked in the permafrost, I thought” is inspired. The whole piece is inspired! I enjoyed it immensely.

February 16, 2015 Issue

Sunday’s blizzard dumped a humongous load of snow here. Roads are impassable; mailboxes are either buried or decapitated by the plow; there’s been no mail delivery. As a result, this week’s New Yorker hasn’t arrived. I’m not crazy about reading the magazine’s electronic version. I prefer the old-fashioned paper-and-ink version, which I can underline and make notes on. But I don’t want to get too far behind in my New Yorker reading. In the circumstances, I’ve decided to pick one short piece from the online edition. My choice is Ian Frazier’s Talk story "Russophilia." It’s Frazier’s first piece of the new year, and it’s a beauty. Writing in the third person (in accordance with Talk custom), he calls himself  “the Russophile” and describes a Russian gala concert he recently attended at Barclay’s Center in Brooklyn. Frazier is indeed a Russophile, as anyone who's read his great Travels In Siberia (2010) well knows, and in “Russophila” he savors the details of the Russian crowd – their clothes (“The men wore dark coats and hats, and the women came in furs of every description”), their pocketbooks (“The pocketbooks they set down for guards to inspect were of shiny leather, studded, strapped, embossed, metallic-looking, with black-and-white checkerboard patterns, zebra stripes, and paisley swirl”), their perfume (“When undone, scarves with modernistic prints sent out gusts of international perfume”). His description of the performers contains this wonderful line: “Enter an equally blond woman in a Gypsy-ish outfit who sang a song with a mariachi rhythm while legions of silhouetted saguaro cacti and purple skulls with pinwheel eyes advanced across the screens.” The best part of “Russophilia” is its vivid conclusion:

Almost nobody left the gala concert early. When, after three hours, all was done, and Krutoi and company had withdrawn to sincere, dignified applause, the place took forever to empty out. It made no difference if you turned right or left; both directions were packed. Finally, the crowd began to reach the street, and many immediately lit cigarettes. The night had become even colder. Snow crunching underfoot, nostril-freezing air, and heavy cigarette smoke: all at once, an exact duplication of a midwinter night in Russia, there on Flatbush Avenue.

That “The night had become even colder. Snow crunching underfoot, nostril-freezing air, and heavy cigarette smoke: all at once, an exact duplication of a midwinter night in Russia, there on Flatbush Avenue” is marvelously fine. It contains echoes of one of my favorite passages in Travels In Siberia, a description of Frazier and his friend Luda leaving St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theater after a ballet performance:

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.

What is the Russian word for “exquisite”? Google Translate says it’s “изысканный.” Very well then – изысканный!

February 11 & 18, 2013 Issue

I’m drawn to writers who celebrate everyday life and “give the mundane its beautiful due” (Updike's great credo). This week's issue features three of the best: Joseph Mitchell, Ian Frazier, and Susan Orlean. Mitchell, in his wonderful “Street Life,” celebrates “the common, ordinary city.” Describing the pleasure of aimlessly riding city buses, gazing out the window at “the flowing backdrop of buildings,” he says,

There is no better vantage point from which to look at the common, ordinary city – not the lofty, noble, silvery vertical city, but the vast, spread-out, sooty-gray and sooty-brown and sooty-red and sooty-pink horizontal city, the snarled-up and smoldering city, the old, polluted, betrayed, and sure-to-be-torn-down-any-time-now city.

Mitchell’s piece is remarkable for its long sentences. I don’t associate him with long-line writing. But “Street Life” contains at least three sentences exceeding 140 words. One of them is a gorgeous assemblage that begins, “At any hour of the day or night, I can shut my eyes and visualize in a swarm of detail what is happening on scores of streets …,” and runs for 348 words.

Another writer who seeks his material at street level is Ian Frazier. In his sad, brilliant “The Toll,” he drives and walks the “crumple zone” of Staten Island, noting the debris left by Hurricane Sandy:

A chain-link fence that ran along Bobby Thomson Field nearby had caught the flood’s smaller pieces of debris. Mostly they were grass stems and vine tendrils, combined with plastic shreds, zip ties, coffee stirrers, cup lids, swizzlesticks, plastic cutlery, and plastic drinking straws. In the fence, they glitter like minnows in a net.

Frazier’s eye for bags in trees is as sharp as ever (recall his great “Bags in Trees” series, included in his 2005 collection Gone To New York). In “The Toll,” he writes,

Deep gouges in the banks undercut fences and asphalt biking trails, and the scrubby trees far above the usual high-tide line hunkered down as if some massive creature had slept on them. Shreds of plastic bags hung among the branches everywhere, while the ocean, distant and calm at low tide, offered its quiet wavelets and asked, “Who, me?”

Bags in trees are also an ingredient in “The Toll”’s most inspired sentence:

Standing in a soggy no man’s forest near a beach, with invasive Japanese honeysuckle and bittersweet and greenbrier vines dragging down the trees, and shreds of plastic bags in the branches, and a dirty snow of Styrofoam crumbs on the ground, and heaps of hurricane detritus strewn promiscuously, and fierce phragmites reeds springing up all over, I saw the landscape of the new hot world to come.

That “dirty snow of Styrofoam crumbs” is very fine. Of course, Frazier isn’t celebrating storm debris. But he’s an acute noticer of it. His descriptions of it are sublime. See also his description of the waterfront junk pile in Nome (Travels In Siberia, 2010), the trash on the ground around Yellow Bird’s gas and convenience store (On the Rez, 2000), and the contents of abandoned prairie farmhouses (Great Plains, 1989).

Susan Orlean’s marvelous “Walart” profiles artist Brendan O’Connell, who sees art in “eight feet of Cheetos.” O’Connell paints “Walmart paintings” and perceives Walmart stores as the ideal place to study “the practice of everyday life.” Regarding O’Connell’s work, Orlean says, “The paintings are soft and luscious, built out of small brushstrokes, as if Pierre Bonnard had ventured into Supercenter Store No. 5154 with an easel.” “Walart” has a terrific opening line: “Some years back, Brendan O’Connell had a revelation in a Winn-Dixie.” I read that and smiled. It reminded me of another supermarket piece by Orlean – her splendid “All Mixed Up” (The New Yorker, June 22, 1992; included in her My Kind of Place, 2004), about Sunshine Market in Jackson Heights. O’Connell isn’t the only one who makes art out of supermarkets; Orlean turned the trick twenty-one years ago.

The appearance of a new Mitchell, Orlean, or Frazier piece is, for me, an event. In the case of Mitchell, who died seventeen years ago, it’s a miracle! To find three of them in one issue is pure bliss. Thank you very much, New Yorker! 

Travels In Siberia - Part V

In Part V, the concluding section of this great book, Frazier makes his fifth (and shortest) Siberian journey, a trip to Novosibirsk in the fall of 2009. Why Novosibirsk? Frazier says, “I had wanted someplace cold, dark, remote, and hibernating. Novosibirsk at five thirty on a November morning seemed to be all of those.” He describes coming out of the airport and smelling the air: “My lungs filled with a familiar, delicious Siberian combination of second-hand smoke and bitter-cold air. One basic purpose had been accomplished. I had breathed the air.”

During his first few days in Novosibirsk, he walks the city, visiting the Novosibirsk Regional Museum, the Novosibirsk State Art Museum, the Pobeda (Victory) Theatre, the Museum of Siberian Communications (displaying, among other interesting things, a “1950s TV that many older Russians remember because it had a tiny screen over which was superimposed a large magnifying lens that had to be filled with special distilled water”) and a giant shopping mall called the Mega-Ikea (“The only part of the mall I really liked was right at the door, in the rush of heated air that pushed back against the exterior cold”).

He takes the bus to Akademgorodok to meet Ivan Logoshenko, a friend of his brother-in-law. He gets off the bus in Akademgorodok and, while waiting for Logoshenko to come pick him up, observes a group of boys horsing around. His description of this scene is one of the best passages in a book brimful with great writing:

The boys continued to play all around me, oblivious, like fish around a scuba diver. One kid climbed partway up a nearby fir and began to shake snow down on his companions. This got a laugh. Then a boy who was hopping here and there doing karate kicks happened to kick an aluminum light pole. Atop the light pole was a shade like a broad, flat hat, carrying a tall accumulation of snow. The kick sent some snow down on another kid’s head. Great hilarity. All the kids then began karate kicking the light pole, which responded with satisfying dull bongs and cascade after cascade of snow. Meanwhile, several mothers pulled up in their cars and were chatting with one another, occasionally interrupting themselves to tell the boys to quit kicking the light pole. The boys only kicked more, and finally one of the boys, with high exuberance, began singing “Jingle Bells,” in English, in time to his kicks. Snow tumbling off the light pole in showers, “Jingle Bells,” bong, bong, bong, great laughter. He knew the words and sang them perfectly, without accent.

How fine that “Snow tumbling off the light pole in showers, ‘Jingle Bells,’ bong, bong, bong, great laughter” is! Frazier works his magic, strings these words together, and – presto! – a slice of Novosibirsk life springs into being.

Frazier ends his book on a humble note. Even though he’s shown us a huge, rich chunk of Siberia, its people and its history, he says, “What I’d seen of Siberia was only a tiny part.” He then proceeds to identify some of the things he didn’t see: bears, hydropower dams, reindeer herds, forest fires, climate scientists, a drunken forest (“a forest in which the thawing of the supporting permafrost causes the trees to lean every which way”), and so on. It’s quite a list and an effective way of emphasizing Siberia’s hard-to-comprehend complexity and vastness.

In “Acknowledgments” at the back of the book, Frazier says of Mike Peed, of The New Yorker’s fact-checking department, that he “pursued factual accuracy with rigor while never neglecting to listen for the poetical – a rare skill.” It seems to me that these words could be used to describe Frazier’s work, as well.

I think Travels In Siberia is a masterpiece. I can easily imagine someone fifty or a hundred years from now reading it and being so inspired that he or she tries to follow in Frazier’s footsteps, retracing his routes, searching for the places that he visited (e.g., Severobaikalsk’s amazing winter garden, with its “ficuses, banana plants, wild grapevines, cacti, pineapple plants, and lemon trees growing this way and that in the bath of the heat”), just as Frazier himself was inspired by George Kennan’s Tent Life in Siberia, and tried to find the pillar – “this grief-consecrated pillar,” as Kennan described it - that marked the spot where exiles walking the Trakt officially crossed into Siberia.

Travels In Siberia - Part IV

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!

Travels In Siberia - Part III

“Because I am interested in ruins, I decided to drive over to the town site.” This is from the astonishing “Nicodemus” chapter (Chapter 9) of Ian Frazier’s Great Plains (1989), a work I hold dear, one of only three books I took with me in my pack when I headed North a few years ago. (The other two were Seamus Heaney’s Preoccupations and Zbigniew Herbert’s Barbarian in the Garden). I’m pleased to see that Frazier’s interest in ruins continues undiminished in Travels In Siberia. Among the highlights of Part III are his exploration of an abandoned church near his campsite on the Severnaya Dvina River (“One of the lower towers had a broken dome and a good-sized birch tree growing straight up through it”), a look at the vacant lot in Yekaterinburg where the house in which Nicholas II was murdered had been located (“It reminded me of an erasure done so determinedly that it had worn a hole through the page”), and, most memorably, a viewing of a section of the Sibirskii Trakt, which many thousands of exiles had walked in tsarist times (“Longing and melancholy seemed to have worked themselves into the very soil; the old road and the land around it seemed downcast, as if they’d had their feelings hurt by how much the people passing by did not want to be here”). I enjoyed these visits tremendously. Anyone interested in the role of the imagination in factual writing could profit from a study of Frazier’s contemplations of ruins. His imagination doesn’t so much press back against reality; it takes off from it. “In the ruts of the old Trakt,” he says, “I tried to picture its former magnitude.” Here’s what he pictured:

I imagined parties of prisoners tramping along it, chains jingling, and sleighs slipping by in winter, and imperial couriers on horseback bound for Peking, and troops of soldiers, and runaway serfs, and English travelers, and families of Gypsies, and hordes of tea wagons in clouds of dust.

That “hordes of tea wagons in clouds of dust” is very fine. I notice that the New Yorker version of this passage has a semicolon after “jingling.” I question the need for an extra long pause there; it seems to me that the comma in the book version is all that’s needed. It appears that most of the New Yorker text has made it into the book unchanged. But I did spot a couple of subtle amendments. For example, in the “Convicts Road” section of “Travels In Siberia – I” (The New Yorker, August 3, 2009), Frazier says, “I had seen some lonesome roads, but this one outdid them.” Whereas, in Part III of the book, he says, “I had seen some lonesome roads, but this one outdid them all” (emphasis added). In “The Vagon” section of “Travels In Siberia – II” (The New Yorker, August 10 & 17, 2009), Frazier says, “The guys who drive this long-distance shuttle tend to wear muscle shirts, shiny Adidaa sweatpants, and running shoes, and their short, pale haircuts stand up straight in a bristly Russian way.” In the book, “guys” is changed to “entrepreneurs.” The same section of the magazine piece contains this wonderful description of the view from a moving train: “At this speed I could see the trackside weeds, curved like shepherds’ crooks by the spiderwebs attached to them, the frost on the web strands glistening in the sun.” Interestingly, the book version of the foregoing passage deletes the comma after “weeds.” With regard to most changes (as I say, there aren’t many), I think the book version is slightly better.

One aspect of the magazine articles that I really like, which is not included in the book, is the map work by Laszlo Kubinyi. The maps are beautifully tinted and decorated. For example, in the upper left corner of the map illustrating “Travels In Siberia – I,” there’s a miniature of the white Renault step van that Frazier and his two guides traveled in. The tiny picture shows the van with its hood raised and two figures peering in at the engine. This is a witty reference to the frustrating mechanical troubles that plagued the van throughout the five and a half week trip. I take the liberty of reproducing this handsome map here.

Part III was a great source of reading pleasure. It contains the complete nine thousand mile journey. It’s endlessly quotable. I'll conclude with a quotation of my favorite passage, a description of a scene glimpsed through the windshield of that temperamental van:

Vistas kept appearing until the eye hardly knew what to do with them – dark green tree lines converging at a distant yellow corner of the fields, and the lower trunks of a birch grove black as a bar code against a sunny meadow behind them, and the luminous yellows and greens of vegetables in baskets along the road, and grimy trucks with only their license numbers wiped clean, their black diesel smoke unraveling behind them across the sky.

Travels In Siberia - Part II

The best part of Part II begins, “One morning during that January I went on an expedition to Peterhof, the grand palace built by Peter the Great twenty-five miles west of the city on the Gulf of Finland.” On this expedition, Frazier gets on the wrong train and ends up in a village called Little Verevo. I like his description of the village: “eight or ten houses, with no lights showing, and snow draping roofs and fences as if it had been laid on in multiple coats every day since fall." In Little Verevo, he encounters two women (“Both had weathered, wrinkled-shoe faces, multiple worts, and lively pale-blue eyes”) who tell him the right train to take to Peterof. When Frazier finally gets to Peterof, he visits the Cottage Palace. His description of the Morskoi Cabinet on the top floor is very fine, particularly his mention of “a long brass telescope and a speaking trumpet” that he sees on a table. At one point, Frazier uses “crowbar” as a verb. He says, “To me St. Petersburg seems more like a hole in the corner of a sealed-tight packing crate that Peter crowbarred open violently from inside. Once the breach was made, the light flowed in, and it continues to flow.” I recall Frazier saying something similar in his New Yorker article “Invented City” (July 28, 2003): “Oceanic light continues to pour through this opening he crowbarred into the corner of Russia just as he intended.” I think Frazier’s use of “crowbarred” is inspired. Part II contains one other highlight – a flight to Little Diomede in the Bering Strait, which occasions this memorable description of sea ice: “In places where linen-white ice expanses met, the lines of crunched-up ice pieces were the exact same blue as Comet Cleanser.” In Little Diomede, Frazier does exactly what I would’ve done: he walks around looking at stuff, e.g., “a frozen seal on the floor of the vestibule of the tribal health building,” “a polar bear skin hanging on a wooden frame,” and most interestingly, “a walrus-skin boat on a rack near a launching ramp at the bottom of town,” which Frazier says, was a "museum-quality object.” These details alone made Part II worth reading. I ate them up. I also liked Frazier’s drawing of a jumble of sheds that illustrates the beginning of Part II. I’m looking forward to Part III, in which Frazier finally launches his nine-thousand-mile road trip across Siberia.

Travels In Siberia - Part I

This is just a quick progress report on my reading of Ian Frazier’s Travels In Siberia. I finished Part I last night. I enjoyed it immensely. I was surprised by the amount of new material, i.e., material not previously published in The New Yorker. Almost all of Part I is new, except for Chapter 1, which appeared in “Travels In Siberia – I” (The New Yorker, August 3, 2009). Part I of the book covers a couple of Russian trips that Frazier made back in the early nineties before he undertook the epic drive across Siberia that he described so memorably in the magazine. Part I brims with inspired writing. One of my favorite passages is a description of Nome:

It’s irregular waterfront lots accumulate crumbled-up Caterpillar treads, school bus hulks, twisted scaffolding in rats’-nest heaps, rusted gold dredges, busted paddle wheels, crunched pallets, hyperextended recliner chairs, skewed all-terrain vehicle frames, mashed wooden dogsleds, multicolored nylon cable exploded to pompoms, door-sprung ambulance vans, dinged fuel tanks, shot clutch plates, run-over corrugated pipe, bent I beams, bent rebars, bent vents. The pileup at land’s end is almost audible, as if you could hear the echoes of the cascade from the continental closet where all of it once was stored.

For me, Part I’s highlight is Frazier’s account of his trip to a Chukotka fish camp. Frazier provides numerous vivid details, e.g., descriptions of an ancient Yupik camp site (“On the long, grassy expanse above the seaside gravel, many large skulls of bowhead whales they had killed stood in an unevenly spaced line”), the sea’s surface (“Here and there curled white feathers dropped from the passing seabirds sat undisturbed like wood shavings on a shiny floor”), a Yupik village (“Most of the houses were of stucco and lath construction, trim and cozy looking, with salmon hanging all along the eaves to dry, wooden ladders leading to outside attic doors and neat yards”), making tea (“Then he produced a blowtorch, lit it, applied its flame to the blackened teapot, and boiled water for tea”). I devoured this section of the book and wished for more. At the beginning of Chapter 2, Frazier says, “When I was in my early forties, I became infected with a love of Russia.” After reading Part I, I believe I'm becoming infected, too. I'll report further after I’ve finished Part II.