Travels in Siberia by Ian Frazier

(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 544 pages, $30)

Ian Frazier’s latest work of nonfiction offers fitting tribute to a place he calls “the greatest horrible country in the world,” said Carmela Ciuraru in the San Francisco Chronicle. Smitten by the “weirdness” of Russia from the moment, in 1993, when he first visited, the veteran New Yorker writer ventured again and again to the heart of Siberia—the nation’s largest, and oddest, region. Stretching some 7,000 miles and encompassing eight time zones, the territory that has been synonymous with exile since the time of the czars provided fertile soil for Frazier’s “relentless curiosity.” In a book that combines memoir, history, and the author’s own ink sketches, “Frazier has managed to create a genre of his very own.”

He’s “especially good at bringing the reader along with him,” said Bruce Ramsey in The Seattle Times. The book’s centerpiece is a five-week sojourn by van across Siberia, and Frazier’s account shows him to be “a master of conveying first impressions”—from the putrid state of Russia’s bathrooms to “the boundless look of land with no fences.” One only wishes that he had better traveling companions. Frazier’s two Russian guides “resist anything that resembles controversy, particularly the communist-era prison camps.” This eliminates the possibility of probing conversations and forces Frazier to fill in such holes by backtracking. Those sections simply feel “tacked on.”

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The book turns out to be very much like Siberia itself, said Margaret Quamme in the Columbus, Ohio, Dispatch. It “has stretches where it goes on for seemingly endless pages and other spots where it offers rewards not found elsewhere.” Frazier “is no scholar” and his history lessons often lack insight. But “when he sticks to his daily experiences, Travels in Siberia sizzles.” Its description of Russia’s smell is unshakable: “There’s a lot of diesel fuel in it, and cucumber peels, and old tea bags, and sour milk.” In such passages, Frazier offers proof that “the best travel writing is often about the worst travel experiences.”