Rough Guide

Tourism these days can be a miserable experience. Waiting in endless lines to get into must-see museums. Eating at overpriced traps for out-of-towners or...See more » Tourism these days can be a miserable experience. Waiting in endless lines to get into must-see museums. Eating at overpriced traps for out-of-towners or guidebook-sanctioned local eateries where most of your fellow patrons are holding the same guidebook as the one in your hand. Daniel Kalder, Scottish author of the travel narrative "Lost Cosmonaut," has had enough. "These days the world is infested with Europeans: you can't go anywhere without encountering German backpackers or twenty-strong mobs of Italian teenagers in bright yellow jackets," he laments. Not for him are the glories of the Great Wall of China or the Taj Mahal, which he describes as "banal as the face of a Cornflakes packet." Kalder is looking for uncharted ground, places that aren't flooded with Western tourists and are therefore Real. He joins a long line of writers (Paul Bowles, Jack Kerouac, Bruce Chatwin) who have combed the globe for a refuge from civilization. Kalder's innovation is that he isn't expecting to find Shangri-La. Rather, the author, who bills himself as an "anti-tourist," is looking for misery as a relief from comfort. At the beginning of the book, he presents an anti-tourist manifesto, the fancifully titled "Shymkent Declarations." A few samples: "The anti-tourist does not visit places that are in any way desirable. "The anti-tourist eschews comfort. "The anti-tourist embraces hunger and hallucinations and shit hotels. ... "The anti-tourist holds that whatever travel does, it rarely broadens the mind." Where else to find discomfort, hunger and shit hotels but in the far-flung corners of the former Soviet Union? And so Kalder takes us to four desolate destinations: Tatarstan, home to one of Peter the Great's collections of deformed babies in bottles; Kalmykia, ruled over by a dictatorial chess enthusiast who apparently claims to have been abducted by aliens; Mari-El, one of the last bastions of paganism on Earth; and Udmurtia, home of Mikhail Kalashnikov, inventor of the AK-47, as well as a local ethnic population of Udmurts who have been so brutally repressed that their presence is almost impossible to detect. Kalder makes good on several of his promises as an anti-tourist, immersing himself in bleakness and serving up some engrossing yet terrifying details. (Along the way, he gets off a few good digs at The Moscow Times.) From the drug wars of Tatarstan to the mail-order brides of Mari-El to the mammoth factories and empty train carriages in Udmurtia, Kalder paints a stark picture of unremitting dreariness. Imagine sitting down to dinner at the Sputnik Cafe in Kalmykia: "The meatballs were cold and full of gristle and very hard to swallow, but they were by no means the worst thing. The worst thing was the 'special Kalmyk tea,' which was a lukewarm mixture of grease, tea, and salt." The astoundingly ugly and downright weird minutiae of daily life in "Lost Cosmonaut" at first made me wonder if the places described in the book actually exist, but some cursory Internet research revealed that indeed they do. It's a shame that Kalder's writing, line by line, isn't equal to the task of fully rendering the grimly fascinating terrain he tries to describe. The following sentence is typical of his lack of concern for syntax: "He was a thin young man in a cheap suit with melancholy eyes." Amazing how a suit can have eyes. Worse, his tone veers wildly from good-natured bombast to irony to hard-bitten realism to mawkish pathos. Sometimes he reaches for a grandiloquence that comes off as unintentionally comic, for example, "suddenly the pall of reality fell over me," or "Kalmykia was a place trembling with anxiety." His insights are often shallow, as in the passage beginning with the apparently unintentional rhyme, "The crowd was proud." He then continues: "That their tiny republic could produce such music, such beauty! It validated their existence, too." Most of the time Kalder aims for a jokey irony that sometimes comes off mean, as, for example, his gratuitous swipes at a portly policeman in Kalmykia, "a piggy bastard with an impertinent grinSee less »