Confessions of a clueless wanderer: ThePost.ie


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Confessions of a clueless wanderer
Sunday, February 12, 2006 - Reviewed by Jonathan O'Brien
Lost Cosmonaut, by Daniel Kalder, Faber & Faber, €18.95.

Given the number of travelogues it has been the subject of since opening its borders in the early 1990s, the former Soviet Union would seem to be the new Provence. Its barren steppes, vast open spaces, eventful politics and high weirdo quotient all lend themselves easily to vivid anecdotage and reportage.

Of course, any writer trying to write a book about the world’s largest country has to be judicious in the area they explore.

Nobody’s really interested any more in reading about the increasingly familiar Baltic states, while there’s probably little future in embarking upon a trip to the war-torn mountains of the Caucasus: if kidnappers don’t get you, an accidentally-discharged Russian army rifle probably will.

Daniel Kalder has chosen instead to write a book about four regions on the eastern fringes of Russia’s ‘European’ land mass, starting with Tatarstan, then progressing through Kalmykia at the southern end of the Volga. A few years then elapse before he again leaves his native Scotland to go to Mari El, a republic inhabited by indigenous pagans.

He ends up in Udmurtia, his attention drawn by the region’s curiously pacifist history. The locals never fought with rival ethnic groups in their history, preferring to ‘‘run deeper into the forest’’, and when they came under pressure from the Russians to renounce nature-worship and embrace Christianity, they did so without a murmur of protest.

It could have been a classic, but it falls flat for the simple reason that its author seems to be only half-interested in the project himself. Kalder describes himself at one stage, tongue decidedly in cheek, as ‘‘more of a conceptualist, a Brian Eno of the travel world’’.

Unfortunately, the joke is on him in some ways: reading Lost Cosmonaut, you just don’t get much of a sense as to why he is trudging around these strange, half-empty places.

As he enters Udmurtia’s capital, Izhevsk, on the final leg of his quadrilogy, he admits as much: ‘‘I was immediately struck by a feeling that I had no idea what I was doing.”

The following two pages are taken up with him describing his hotel room in minute detail, before engaging in inane musings about what the city looks and sounds like in the confines of his imagination.

Short of things to do, Kalder visits a museum dedicated to Mikhail Kalashnikov, the inventor of the AK-47. This is semi-interesting, but he ruins it by going on about a fax he supposedly sent Kalashnikov requesting an interview. Suffice to say that this was yet another of his flights of fancy.

By the end, he’s standing in a local television studio, being interviewed by a journalist about why he’s come to the region.

He can’t give her much in the way of illuminating answers, which by this point of the book comes as no surprise.

Lost Cosmonaut isn’t a complete dud. Kalder, for all his puerility, is a reasonably decent writer, and there are times when you get a tantalising glimpse of what the book could have been, such as his visit to Chess City, the multi-million-dollar chess centre built in the Kalmykian capital Elista by the region’s oddball ruler, Kirsan Ilumzhinov.

When he finally finds the place after a day of fruitless searching, he discovers it to be a construction of deserted halls filled with chess table after chess table, empty of visitors; a vanity project of magnificent and depressing pointlessness.

Walking around the town, he realises there is not an ad nor a billboard to be seen, only images of the president’s visage.

‘‘Maybe, I thought, it was this absence that made Elista feel so much like the Twilight Zone. Without advertisements on the street there was nothing to remind its citizens of the rest of the world. There was only the president’s face and, just beyond the city, the eternal, identity-erasing steppe.”

A bit more of this and Lost Cosmonaut would have been a far more worthwhile book.

Sadly, most of it is as flat as the bland steppes it describes.