Split across the August 3 and August 10 & 17 issues of the New Yorker, Ian Frazier (apparently a ‘social satirist,’ a novelist and essayist both, with some ten books published) writes of his car trip across Siberia. ‘Travels in Siberia’ was, of course, of great interest to me, since I’ve been across that great land by train, but the extended essay proved to be somewhat flat. It read like an American out of his comfort zone, which of course was the case, but somehow it added fewer insights than I’d anticipated.
But take a look at this, so right and inspired: ‘Almost all the missile arcs [American and Russian nuclear missiles, 'on the walls of think-tank strategy sessions'] went over Siberia. In the Cold War, Siberia provided the “cold”; Siberia was the blankness in between, the space through which apocalypse flew.’