I read this book as I was traveling to Kyrgyzstan. It's great. It made me want to visit the great cities of Samarkand and Bhukara though. I was sad I was not going there...

Another no longer possible journey. What I wouldn't give to go see these places as they once were, but now are left inaccessible.

I was really disappointed in this one, not going to lie. The writing was so incredibly pretentious. The kind of writing that uses big words for the sake of using them, rather than any value they add to the descriptions. I guess it captures a snapshot of the region in a specific moment, but there's an arrogance to the author, an assumption that what he has to say is so incredibly profound, that's just unfortunate.

I was initially enamored with this book, but that soon gave way to boredom. At first the lush descriptions, detailed stories of conversations and connections with along Thubron's route, and historical background of pre-, contemporaneous, post-Soviet times pulled me along; however, this quickly gave way what felt like a formulaic story: Thurbron arrives at a location, provides background, gives description of a connection or conversation, asks questions about the Soviets, asks questions about Islam (and the opinion on the veil for women), laments the lost past and traditions of the land, describes ruins/graveyards/factories, pities the economic challenges of the people (while commenting on how inexpensive everything is for him thanks to the glory of the British pound), and then goes on his way.

I would have liked more about the cities, nations, and people, and less about Thubron's awkwardness as an Englishman with an advantageous exchange rate in former Soviet republics.

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1267616.html[return][return]This is a travelogue of a journey through the five Central Asian former Soviet republics in the early 1990s, shortly after the collapse of the USSR. It had been lingering on my unread books shelf for a while, but I realised that in fact I had read it shortly after it came out. In those days I was interested then in the legacy of Tamerlane and Ulugh Beg in Samarkand, which Thubron indeed describes in so far as it was there to be found. These days I am more interested in the politics, and things have moved on quite a bit in the region: the Tajik civil war, just starting when Thubron was there, has now been over for more than a decade; meanwhile we have had a revolution in Kyrgyzstan, increasing repression in Uzbekistan, the bizarre rule and death of Turkmenbashi, and most of all the War on Terror in the immediate neighbourhood. So the book now feels very out of date. There are a lot of drunken feasts, departing Russians, sweeping generalisations about the facial appearance of people from particular ethnic groups, which I began to find tiresome very quickly. I believe that Thubron did a follow-up volume to this, retracing his earlier route, quite recently but won't rush to pick it up (unless anyone strongly recommends it to me in comments).

A travel book with a slice of history.

Colin Thubron travelled through these newly-independent countries almost immediately after they had left the USSR, and so he captures them at a unique time transition in their history. He records that moment when they were neither one thing nor the other. Some people hankered for the stable past of full employment and economic security. Others looked forward to a future which, though it might be uncertain, with unemployment and rampant inflation, at least promised them freedom.

The dilemma was neatly summed up when Thubron visited the spacious headquarters of the Writers' Union in Bishkek, the capital of Kirghiztan, "once a bureaucratic hub of mediocrity and obstruction". There he met a writer named Kadyr, and asked what people did there now. They don't do anything, said Kadyr. They had hundreds of writers, but no money and no paper. At last they had freedom to write, but the publishers could no longer afford the paper to print what they wrote. "Our spiritual situation is richer, far richer, but our material one is hopeless."

Last month I read [b:The Road to Miran|3280940|The Road to Miran Travels in the Forbidden Zone of Xinjiang|Christa Paula|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328475831l/3280940._SX50_.jpg|3317251], also about Central Asia, but a little further east, in the Xinjiang Region of China. It's a part of the world that has always been rather vague in my mind -- lots of countries with names ending in -stan, but I was never quite sure of where they were in relation to each other. And what I learned about their history from this and some of the other books I have been reading was mostly new to me and quite revealing.

The four countries that are the subject of this books were the creations of Stalin in the 1920s, which I had not known. Their convoluted borders were drawn in Moscow, regardless of geography, so that now major roads sometimes cross international borders several times within a short distance. In that, and in several other ways, they resembled Dr Verwoerd's "Bantu Homelands", and as I read I got a new insight into why the English-language newspapers in South Africa referred the "homelands" as "Bantustans". Perhaps the analogy came from Dr Verwoerd himself, as he tried to explain his vision in the South African parliament, but at any rate the name, and the similarity, stuck.

One of Colin Thubron's concerns, and one that was quite widespread in the West, was that these four countries, where the majority of the population was nominally Muslim, might embrace Islamic fuindamentalism. A lot of his conversations, especially in the earlier part of the book, reflect this concern. In many of the towns he visited he would visit a madrassa and talk to the students who were studying Islam, and try to get their views on this. Most of the mosques and madrassas had been closed under the Bolsheviks, but were rapidly reopening, though for many, particularly in the northern parts, their Islam was more cultural than religious.

The landscapes he describes are also interesting. It seems that much of the arable land was turned to cotton monoculture, the the diversion of rivers to irrigate it dried up the Aral Sea, so that in one case one of the main ports was 60 miles from water. Many other places were turned into industrial wastelands, with polluted air and water.

The book was published 25 years ago, and was written a couple of years before that, so it provides a snapshot of a unique moment in the history of those countries.

A portrait of a unique area at a unique time

What I enjoyed about this was not JUST the unique subject - how many travelogues of central Asia have you come across? - and not just the author's skill in painting a picture with words, but the time in history he was able to capture when the ending of the cold war was still fresh, the Soviet Union only recently buried, and the people most affected by it still trying to decide what it meant for them, and what their future held. In this I found not only Mr. Thubron's skill in painting vivid landscape without actually using a picture (with which I'm becoming familiar), but a rich look into both ancient and recent history that hasn't seemed to be as thoroughly addressed in the West.