Mud and Stars

July 8, 2019
Wheeler (Chile: Travels in a Thin Country) mixes travelogue and literary history in an entertaining work centered on her fascination with the great Russian writers of the 19th century. Zigzagging across a vast landscape, Wheeler visits sites associated with Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Pushkin, and Turgenev, as well as lesser lights, such as Tolstoy’s writer friend Afanasy Fet. Amid accounts of these men’s lives, Wheeler relates her own experiences in homestays, sleeper cars, and hotels, showing how the run-down, seedy, and kitschy live in tension against the beauties of landscape and architecture. To Wheeler, if a single characteristic unites Russia, it is misery, “before, during and after communism.” At times, her tone toward the country and its people borders on mocking, as when noting the provincialism of her Russian language tutor, who “had once been to a conference in Greece, and spoke of the country like the Promised Land.” Vivid details nevertheless propel the narrative, from Gogol’s anorexia to “a tin-can shaded” lightbulb in far eastern Anadyr, where wages hover at just above $200 a month. Fans of Russian literature will find this survey simultaneously provoking and informative. Agent: Lisa Baker, Aitken Alexander Associates (U.K.).

September 15, 2019
The veteran British travel writer roams around Russia, inspired by some of its most storied writers. In the introduction to this adventurous but not always cohesive book, Wheeler (Access All Areas: Selected Writings 1990-2010, 2011, etc.) notes that she aspires to show how Russian literary titans like Dostoyevsky, Pushkin, and Tolstoy spoke both to their time and to present-day Russia. However, in most of the pages that follow, she's not engaging in socio-literary criticism so much as using those authors to lend gravitas to her efforts to grasp the country's current melancholic mood. Near Pushkin's ancestral home, she met a man boozily complaining about Putin; a chapter ostensibly about Dostoyevsky detours into her struggles learning Russian, nearly getting mugged at a St. Petersburg train station, and meeting some couch-surfing youths. Wheeler notes that her Russian teacher adores Turgenev but never explains why; a trip to the Caucasus to walk in Lermontov's footsteps leads to some digressive grousing about the country's poor preparation for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi and sour conclusion that "being Russian has always been miserable." This rhetorical disconnect is especially unfortunate because the text sings when Wheeler thoughtfully weaves her chosen writers with her travels. In Ivan Goncharov's 1859 novel, Oblomov, she finds a Bartleby-esque symbol of the national character, particularly in his hometown in Russia's far eastern region, where there are now "dozens of sets of traffic lights, many of which work." Wheeler's admiring visit to Tolstoy's estate thoughtfully captures the author's mordant mood and his hypocrisies--e.g., his churchy pronouncements about austerity belied more than a dozen illegitimate children). More often, though, the book is best appreciated as light travelogue bolstered with some literary history. Wheeler is impressively well read in Russia's literary golden age, but her pocket biographies could better blend with her excursions.

COPYRIGHT(2019) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from October 15, 2019
Wheeler (O My America!, 2013), one of the finest travel writers and biographers around, merges her twin disciplines in this sterling exploration of contemporary Russia. Using golden-age Russian writers?Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Lermontov, Gogol, Chekhov, Leskov, Herzen, and Tolstoy?as her guides, Wheeler traverses every facet of this vast nation, from its western rim near Estonia to the remote eastern expanses of Siberia. Each chapter begins with a brisk and wonderfully informative biography of a writer, noting the impact of specific places on their fiction. Wheeler also weaves in her personal attempts to learn Russian as she enrolls in numerous courses and immerses herself in the lives of her colorful hosts. She repeatedly documents the parallels between contemporary Russian nationalism and the nineteenth-century Tsarist world; indeed, she fascinatingly conveys how the influence of indigenous, Tsarist, Soviet, and contemporary cultures overlap, intertwine, and clash in this enormous country. While Paul Theroux's writing are a clear inspiration, Wheeler carves a unique portrait of Russia, one informed by a genuine affection for the food, culture, and landscape. A journey through time, space, and personal, culinary, and literary history, Wheeler's latest is a joyous demonstration of how brilliantly immersive travel writing can be at its very best.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)