Riassunto:
From the author of the award-winning White Fever, Kolyma Diaries is an excursion into one of the world's last remaining badlands, a place full of Gulag ghosts and living wrecks. All along the 2000 kilometres of the Kolyma highway, Bader is plied with vodka. He hears mesmerizing, sometimes devastating, tales of the journeys that brought his 'fellow travellers', the people who give him lifts, to this benighted land. This is a book about the descendants of prisoners eking out a living, of conmen and veterans and scrap iron dealers, of corrupt politicians and organised crime. Stories are told of sons given away, husbands who reappear after three decades, scholars who now survive by foraging for mushrooms and berries, sculptors who hoard the heads lopped off statues of Lenin, miners who dig up mass graves while looking for gold, and all the addicts, convicts, fallen heroes and even sportsmen who run away from their troubles and end up in the most remote region in Russia
Recensione:
'One of the most memorable travel books I have read, sometimes hilarious and sometimes almost unbearably sad stories of death, courage, cruelty and vodka. Jacek Hugo-Bader has travelled in some of the strangest and most remote reaches of Siberia, but what he has brought back are stories of the furthest reaches of the human spirit. Magnificent' --Andrew Brown, author of Fishing in Utopia
'Hugo-Bader's journey through the bleak suspended reality of Kolyma is a pilgrimage like no other. The cumulative effect on the reader of his stark diary entries is overwhelming. In a place where the cold itself is murderous, every chance meeting is at once a moral encounter with the Soviet legacy of cruelty and loss, and a source of primal warmth. Kolyma Diaries is a powerful and courageous work of witness - often funny, always unflinching in its confrontation with human sorrow' --Rachel Rolonsky, author of Molotov's Magic Lantern
'As in his previous book White Fever (2011), Hugo-Bader extracts brilliant tales from the extraordinary characters he meets (and drinks with) along the way. The result is a staggering, eye-opening account of a hellish region' --Financial Times
'I have never read a book that more purely captures the strangeness of travel in remote bits of Russia. It is a fascinating composite impression of one of the wildest bits of one of the world's weirdest countries. And it is told by a masterful traveller in the very best Polish tradition' **** --Daily Telegraph
'Powerful stuff, written by a man who seems to be the natural heir to Ryszard Kapuscinski' --'Best new travel titles', Conde Nast Traveller
'Hugo-Bader has a remarkable ability to get close to this array of individuals and to unearth their extraordinary stories. He succeeds in bringing them to life with his funny, engaging, thought-provoking prose. Kolyma Diaries is an excellent read for anyone interested in understanding the grim legacy of the gulags but also how the human spirit can flourish in the bleakest areas' --Socialist Review
'It is a testament to Hugo-Bader's skill and the strength of his subjects that the book is not only charming, but life-affirming. Its primary concerns are not flashy villains or remembered horror, but ordinary people' --Wall Street Journal
'Hugo-Bader has a remarkable ability to get close to this array of individuals and to unearth their extraordinary stories. He succeeds in bringing them to life with his funny, engaging, thought-provoking prose. Kolyma Diaries is an excellent read for anyone interested in understanding the grim legacy of the gulags but also how the human spirit can flourish in the bleakest areas' --Socialist Review
'A rich gallery of characters with gripping stories to tell' --Travel book of the year chosen by Tom Adair, Scotsman
'Hugo-Bader has a remarkable ability to get close to this array of individuals and to unearth their extraordinary stories. He succeeds in bringing them to life with his funny, engaging, thought-provoking prose. Kolyma Diaries is an excellent read for anyone interested in understanding the grim legacy of the gulags but also how the human spirit can flourish in the bleakest areas' --Socialist Review
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