Reviewer
Lavanya Karthik: Lavanya is from Mumbai, India and is a licensed
architect and consultant in environmental management. She lives in
Mumbai with her husband and six-year old daughter. She loves reading
and enjoys a diverse range of authors across genres.
Author: Daniel Kalder
ISBN: 978-1-59020-226-5
Publisher: Overlook Press
Click Here To Purchase Strange Telescopes: Following the Apocalypse from Moscow to Siberia
Strange
Telescopes chronicles Kalder's journeys through post-perestroika
Russia, Siberia and the Ukraine in search of four people who
view the world 'through strange telescopes' - individuals that have
created alternate realities for themselves. His quests take him to
remote places far from any conventional tourist route, seeking a peek
into these unique worlds that exist not so much on the ground as in
people's heads. Are they visionaries, con artists or just deluded
eccentrics? Either way, suggests Kalder, they represent a
phenomenon rather uniquely Russian, triggered by individual struggles
to survive the economic and social upheaval caused by the fall of the
USSR.
An article in a Russian magazine he cheekily dubs
'Residential Property Shit'leads Kalder to the first of these four
parallel worlds, the 'Underground Planet'in the sewer network under
Moscow, and its self crowned monarch, the Digger.
Next
stop the Ukraine, where Father Grigory aka the Teacher briskly
conducts exorcisms in a remote rural outpost, while also managing a
large farm and delivering each of his fifteen children
himself.
Next, a remote commune in Siberia where an
ex-traffic cop renamed Vissarion, apparently Christ's Second Coming,
leads his faithful flock towards salvation and an ecofriendly
future.
And finally, a meeting with Nikolai Sutyagin,
architect of Russia's tallest wooden building and, by his own
admission, perestroika as well.
The four stories are
interesting case studies in the power of belief. Each of these
characters has an unshakeable conviction in their own mission, in the
'rightness' of their actions. And this is a conviction that is
infectious - three of these men have attracted a following for
their ideas, some of whom we meet through the course of the book. By
contrast, Kalder comes away from each contrast bewildered by this
steadfast faith that spurs people to renounce their lives and embrace
the hardship and deprivation that come with it.
The narrative
is sprinkled with postcards and historical vignettes, chronicling a
quest that is sometimes bizarre, sometimes surreal and always
entertaining. Kalder writes with wry humour and vigour,focusing
his scathing wit both on the people he meets as well as himself. This
is not, however, the avuncular humour of say, Bill Bryson's
travel writing. Kalder never really develops a fondness for the
people or country he is writing about; at one point he dismisses an
entire generation as 'pasty faced wankers' and elsewhere,he refers to
them as "..people who turned out to be saps, fools, thieves,
baby-rapists and mass murderers."
Still, this is
compelling prose that kept me hooked. And as much as this is a book
about the power of faith, it is also about disillusionment -
mostly the author's own. He approaches each encounter with enthusiasm
and the excitement of the seeker looking to believe, if he would only
be shown a sign; by the end, however, he comes away let down by the
wide variance between what each world has promised, and the realities
it presents him with. The book ends almost abruptly, with Kalder
rushing through his meeting with Sutyagin before leaving Russia
altogether. By then , he has run out of questions; his
disillusionment with these worlds and with his own need to seek them
out seems complete. He has no great thesis to deliver either or
conclusions to draw ; all he can say is that he has been
merely
"..a combination of vibrating air
particles in their ears and light reflected on the back of their
eyeballs' a fleeting distraction, an interruption in the midst of
their important work... And now they continued to gaze through their
strange telescopes at marvellous stars so distant that no one else
could see them."
For me, this book was as much about
the author himself - our own strange telescope into the fantastic
worlds he seeks out and examines- and the compulsions that draw him
onward on each of these journeys.
A unique travelogue -
bizarre yet beautiful, much like the region it portrays.