the where of it

on the road with ian frazier

• Posted by Summer Wood on March 4th, 2010 filed in craft of writing, places, routes
• 3 Comments »

Last time I promised more Siberia. Lucky you! There’s plenty of it to go around.

There’s so much Siberia, in fact, that it took Ian Frazier and two Russian pals five weeks and two days to cross it in a diesel-powered Renault step van. He wrote about the experience in a two-part article The New Yorker published last August.

Nearly anywhere Ian Frazier goes, I will follow. I first encountered his writing in Great Plains, his non-fiction account of the huge hunk of land (and its various denizens, human and otherwise) that makes up the American midsection. (Here’s a good interview with Frazier, discussing On the Rez, another of his books.)

Clearly, this is a man unfazed by size.

But if the American Midwest is big, Siberia occupies a different order of magnitude. All of the continental U.S. and most of Europe could fit in the broad swath of land – forty-six hundred miles wide – that’s loosely considered Siberia. It doesn’t exist, officially. Not as a political entity, anyway. But try telling that to the world’s largest forest, the vast expanse of tundra, and the miles on miles of steppe that comprise the region. Try telling that to the thirty-eight million Russians and native people who live there. (If you can find them.)

Try telling New Yorker readers about a landscape that foreign and that daunting – and you’d better have a few tricks up your sleeve to make it work.

My disinterest in Siberia notwithstanding, I read the article, “Travels in Siberia,” with absolute relish the first time through. And then I read it again, more carefully, to try to understand how Frazier manages to keep our keen interest while plowing through material that might more likely be encountered in a sixth-grade report.

The names of the mountains. The names of the rivers. The political borders. The climate, mineral reserves, transportation system, flora and fauna and history. Are you asleep yet?

Not if you’re reading the article. If you’re reading, you’re on the edge of your chair. The river does what? you say. No shit! How big are the logs? How cold does it get? Tell me more!

Because you are there, and that’s your buddy Ian pointing out some of the more interesting aspects of the place to you. He’s giving you some background information, weaving his presence, his agile intelligence, his wit, and his personal credibility into language that is both accessible and deftly structured for maximum pleasure.

If you give much thought to rhetoric – not just how to construct an argument, but, more broadly, how to structure any written work to persuade the reader to join your corner – this article is a goldmine of successful strategies.

The Ural Mountains, which cross Russia north to south from the Arctic Ocean to Kazakhstan, are the western edge of Siberia. The Urals also separate Europe from Asia. As a mountain range with the big job of dividing two continents, the Urals aren’t much. It is possible to drive over them, as I have done, and not know. In central Russia, the summits of the Urals average between one thousand and two thousand feet. But after you cross the Urals the land opens out, the villages are farther apart, the concrete bus shelters along the highway become fewer, and suddenly you realize you’re in Siberia.

In general, abstract facts are stingily allotted short sentences. Frazier saves his words for the tangible – what the reader can see, hear, feel, imagine – and varies the sentence length so that no paragraph feels overburdened with either fact or image. And he is constantly, constantly interjecting narrative: the obvious narrative line of his travels, and the oblique introduction of brief stories to illustrate ideas.

Makes me want to go somewhere. Kathy and I are headed to Tucson for a brief jaunt – springtime in the desert, all that jazz – but we’ve been kicking around the idea of a longer trip, too. We’re thinking maybe it would be fun to take a month and walk the Camino de Santiago across Spain.

In the meantime, I’m content to travel along with writers who can make me see and smell and feel the place they’re moving through.

Any recommendations of writers who have done that for you?