Lost Cosmonaut

Daniel Kalder's Lost Cosmonaut is funny and... weird. A little weird. Not too much. As travel writing goes, it's certainly unique. You can read a dozen travel books about Tuscany or the French countryside or Ireland. But there is only one travel book about Udmurtia, or Mari-El, or Kalmykia. This is that book. Certainly you aren't burning to travel to Udmurtia. If you know where Udmurtia is on a map, you are one of a very few people. If you even know what country it's in you're doing better 99%+ of the population of the world. I imagine some Russians are unaware of Udmurtia's existence. Hell, some Americans think Idaho is a job description, so I can only imagine what Russians must think of a place like Kalmykia.

The book is divided into four parts. In the first, Kalder travels at the behest of a friend to Tatarstan, at the eastern edge of European Russia, and discovers an utterly unknown place--unknown to most Europeans (or any Westerners)--with significant cultural development all its own that none of us have ever heard of. I'm considering trying to find a recording of music by one of the "18 Great Tatars" Kalder lists in his book, but he says not to bother--you can't find it. It's not there. This is a country that has been utterly lost to the West--and it's in our backyard.

Next Kalder convinced his travelling partners to accompany him to Kalmykia, a province at the edge of European Russia. The Kalmyks are Turks--the name means "left behind" or some such, as this is the portion of a Turkic tribe expelled from this part of Russia 200 years ago who somehow managed not to leave. It's a country with half the population of Baltimore, Maryland, spread out over a wasteland larger than Texas. Kalder wanted to go see nothing--and that's about all there was. Kalmykia is nominally Buddhist, the only such country in Europe, and the leader of the place is a bit of a wackjob who built an entire (vacant) city in the scrub dedicated to chess. Weird stuff.

In the third and fourth parts of the book Kalder traveled alone, first to Mari-El, the only officially pagan area in Europe (though only half the residents are actually Mari, and maybe half of them actually practice the local religion) and apparently a hotbed of the Russian Wives By Mail industry; and then to Udmurtia, a province named after a people who've been all but subsumed by the Russian culture that surrounds them. Both of these sections started off somewhat slow--in part because Kalder is travelling alone, in part because they start off the same way as the previous two. The fourth section, which by the end was perhaps my favorite, started VERY slow--a fact Kalder acknowledges in a section detailing his attempt to spend the entire trip in his hotel room (he doesn't succeed).

By the latter sections of the book, though, Kalder admits that he had already decided he was working on a book--he wasn't just travelling for the sake of it. Although this hurts the illusion a bit--I wanted to believe he was just visiting these places because he was an eccentric--the knowledge forced Kalder's hand a bit, so that he had to actually get out of the hotel room, set a goal, find something new, figure out what he was looking for in these places. It gave form to his narrative, and though he book would have rather different had it been written without this form (but just by an eccentric Scotsman with a taste for cold weather and poor countries), in the end it made the book feel more whole.

The section on Udmurtia is particularly interesting, as here is a place with a long history and its own culture and language, that has been completely absorbed by Russia. 200 years ago such a place would swiftly lose that language and culture and it's history would have been rewritten, but in the modern era you can't just wipe a culture off the face of the map. Yet this is what's happening--and it's the Udmurt who are allowing it to go on. Kalder makes some interesting points: there may be 1000 years of Udmurt history, but nobody--literally--knows what it is anymore; the Udmurt language was so frighteningly complex that, given the chance to speak Russian instead (itself a complex and difficult language) today's Udmurt leap at the chance; Udmurt cultural traditions in many cases were similar enough to--and sometimes were added to--Russian culture that the distinctions have mostly blended into nothingness. This is a country that by rights should be totally assimilated into the Russian mass, yet that will never be allowed to happen. There will always be someone working to preserve the language, guessing at what the cultural traditions once were, and there probably never be anyone to care. It's kind of sad.

The other sections are not so sad, but they are melancholy in their own way. Kalder is a good guide to such places. He doesn't really laugh at them, which would get tiresome (the dust-jacket copy calls him a "Bill Bryson with Tourette's," which is an insult to both Kalder and to Tourette's patients, and Kalder is in no way as cynical or elitist as Bryson can be), but he does keep a sense of humor about him and about the places he's visited. They're not very nice, after all.

This is genuine travel writing, unlike The Sex Lives of Cannibals or Together Alone, so I can easily say it's the best travel writing I've read all year. I just don't want to compare it to the other two; all three are vastly entertaining and plenty diversionary.

Together Alone

Oh good, a book I've finished somewhat recently.
Together Alone is a fascinating book, and although it's very hard to find (you could always borrow my copy, of course) it is certainly worth looking for. Ron Falconer, the author, spent several years wandering about the South Pacific in his own handbuilt boat, and, together with his wife and two children (and cat and dog) decided to move to a tiny uninhabited island far outside the usual sea lanes. And he actually did it. This is the story.

The island was Caroline, in the far southeastern corner of Kiribati--the very same Kiribati J. Maarten Troost wrote about in the far funnier (but entirely different) The Sex Lives of Cannibals. But this is a far different place from the Tarawa atoll Troost and his wife called home. Caroline supported small populations in the 19th and early 20th Centuries, but by the time the Falconers arrived at the atoll in 1987 it had not seen human habitation for almost 50 years.

Into this paradise the Falconers brought only those things they needed to survive, and they managed to do so for nearly four years. During that time they relied upon annual trips to French Polynesia and occasional visits from passing yachters for whatever they couldn't produce themselves. Over the years they built a fully-functioning settlement.

Falconer's goal was never to achieve total self-sufficiency. It was to achieve isolation. He went there to think big thoughts about society and man's place in the world. Whether he found what he was looking for you can never be sure. Falconer digresses into introspection only occasionally, usually in the form of a conversation with his wife (conversations I assume are mostly made-up and intended just to get the point across), and although you can tell he's doing a lot of thinking about man's impact on the world, for whatever reason he leaves a lot of his thinking off the pages of the book. Perhaps he prefers it that way.

Smittygirl read the book before I did (or at any rate read it after I'd read about 60 pages) and occasionally had to put the thing down and read something else out of frustration with Falconer's occasional self-reverence. Yes, that's the word I was looking for--not self-reference. Falconer does seem to think he was on the verge of--or perhaps right in the thick of--creating a new way of life for all humanity, and he certainly has a bit of an ego. I didn't find it as annoying as she did but then I was also expecting it.

The book is written in the present tense, which I found a bit jarring at times given that the thing wasn't published until 2004, thirteen years after the family left the island.

The Falconers wanted to stay on Caroline as caretakers, but they were evicted by the Kiribati government at the behest of a new leaseholder who wanted to build a casino and other things on the island. Falconer's description of the end of their idyll is sometimes a bit wrenching; of course Falconer may make the family out to be better than they were (it's his book after all), but certainly it seems hard to imagine the family as "undesirables," especially on an otherwise uninhabited island. Given that the leaseholder's plans for development never took off it seems especially unjust that the Falconers were forced to leave.

So the ending's a bit of a downer. Bummer. It's still a really great read. Who hasn't dreamed of running away to some deserted isle to survive by your wits for a while? Well, okay, but who hasn't dreamed of just getting away from it all for a while, getting back to where what matters is a roof and enough to eat and beyond that you're free to do as you please? Ron Falconer and his family actually did that. Together Alone is definitely worth a read.

Notes From a Small Island

Bill Bryson's Notes From a Small Island was voted the best book about Britain by the British themselves in a poll in The Guardian or some such several years ago. It says so on the book jacket somewhere but it's all the way on the other side of the room and I don't want to get up.

Bryson lived in England for fifteen or twenty years (that's also on the book jacket), but this book was written in the weeks before he departed the country to return to the United States. He went across to the continent, then hopped a ferry and returned to England through Dover, just as he had first come to England year previously. He travelled across the country without benefit of a car, which is fairly interesting--partly because it colors the narrative and partly because no one in their right mind would try such a thing in the United States.

There's not a lot to say. It's a great book for the flavor of the English countryside, but lately I find Bryson is sometimes so sarcastic ("wry" in the language of dust-jacket copy writers) that I get the feeling he doesn't enjoy anything at all, really. This wasn't so noticeable in A Walk in the Woods but it was terrible in The Lost Continent. To my surprise this book is at times rather closer to Lost Continent than I'd have hoped.

Which is not to say it's bad. After all, it was as I said voted the best book about Britain by the British (according to that wry dust-jacket copy, or something; really, I should just get up and go get the book but I absolutely refuse to do so at this point), and if for no other reason it's clearly worth a read. It is funny and enjoyable, and Bryson's description of the three-hour film This is Cinerama that he saw in Bradford is enough to make me want to book a flight right now. Well, almost.

The Sex Lives of Cannibals

J. Maarten Troost's The Sex Lives of Cannibals includes little to no information whatsoever regarding cannibal sex, which is almost certainly a good thing.

Mr. Troost was a young over-educated politically-minded Washingtonian with no real plan for life and no desire to do what he'd been educated to do. Huh. Sorta familiar, really. His girlfriend was given the chance to travel to the Pacific island nation of Kiribati, to do... well, it doesn't really matter. Kiribati is in the middle of the ocean. There's nothing around Kiribati except other bits of Kiribati. And none of the bits have anything interesting going on. Mr. Troost notes that it just may be the worst place on Earth.

I finished this book almost three months ago. It was a laugh riot. Sometimes just the chapter titles are enough to make you laugh out loud. If you're going to read one book about being isolated in the South Pacific this year... well, actually, I read two, and they were both pretty good. This one will definitely give you the bigger laughs. Like all travel writing (this is more adventure--or perhaps lack of adventure--than travel) Troost has a little trouble in the final act, but it doesn't diminish the fun. This is definitely worth picking up.