Amazon.com Review
"To some foreigners," writes American journalist Fen Montaigne, "Russia was anathema, a place grim beyond description. But to others, such as myself, Russia was an affliction, an incurable habit. From the very beginning, I was drawn to her dilapidated landscape, inhabited by people who knew hardship as intimately as we might a member of the family." After completing a stint as Moscow bureau chief for the
Philadelphia Inquirer in 1996, Montaigne resolves to feed his habit in a somewhat unorthodox manner: a three-month fly-fishing expedition that will cross 10 time zones from west to east and cover 7,000 miles.
Traveling with a duffel bag bulging with state-of-the-art fishing gear is probably not the best way to journey through a largely impoverished land without arousing suspicion, but the neophyte fly-fisher is romanced by the vastness and anonymity of the place and simply cannot resist. Unknown rivers and lakes, after all, are the stuff of anglers' dreams, and so Montaigne blithely sets out with dancing trout and salmon in his head. All too soon, however, he is disabused of such gumdrop notions. Environmental degradation, bureaucratic hoops, unscrupulous "entrepreneurs," and a parade of vodka parties greet him at nearly every stop.
Montaigne's initial quest is swiftly superseded by a series of picaresque misadventures--some comic, others frightening--that serve to educate the innocent abroad as well as the reader. He tours centuries-old monasteries on the Solovetski archipelago that Stalin once turned into gulags, stumbles across a shallow grave near the Kolyma slave mines, narrowly escapes a pair of buxom highway robbers on the Trans-Siberian Railway, and breaks bread with fish-poaching apparatchiks on the Detrin River. Revealed along the way is a country in utter turmoil, trying to escape from its past without a destination in mind, almost childlike in its simplicity. Some of these East-meets-West scenes are strangely poignant in their squalor. At one vodka-soaked stop, the author obligingly gets drunk with the locals and caps the night by driving a brakeless Ural truck through town, much to the hoots and delight of his hosts: "'Second! Second!' the boys hollered as the engine whined, and I jammed the heavy stick into second gear. We hit a straightaway. I shifted into third and cranked the Ural up to about 25 miles an hour. Ashes from their cigarettes flitted about the cabin. I glanced over at the boys and saw that great, demented smiles had spread on their faces."
Eventually Montaigne overcomes his ineptitude with a flyrod and manages to hook into some nice fish, but his triumph hardly matters; the real catch of the day is the distillation of a moment in time, when a people and their nation drift helplessly in the current. --Langdon Cook
From Publishers Weekly
In a book that is part fly-fishing adventure and part social commentary on rural Russian life, Montaigne (former Moscow bureau chief for the Philadelphia Inquirer) casts his flies in Russia's great rivers and expertly and beautifully hooks the essence of Russia's "dilapidated landscape, inhabited by people who knew hardship as intimately as we might a member of the family." Montaigne fishes for cod and herring off the Solovetsky Islands in the Barents Sea, and for salmon on the Kola PeninsulaAwhere he first meets Russia's new and often unethical businessman trying to make a money off Western sportsmen. He embarks eastward on the trans-Siberian railroad, where he is accosted by one of the railway's ubiquitous stern women train attendants and almost drugged by three women thieves. His first stop is on the Volga River for Russia's famous sturgeon, pike and perch. He then travels to Lake Baikal and Kamchatka, where he encounters many more people, rendering their tales in an evenhanded manner that often captures the poor quality of Russian life. As far as his fishing is concerned, he catches some, loses a few and often doesn't get so much as a bite in Russia's polluted, over-fished waters. And when he does land the big one, he resigns himself to giving it to his hungry Russian guides. In Russia, fishing is not a sport but a way of life, and he is often ridiculed for using such an ineffective method of catching something so precious. Montaigne's enlightened travelogue will appeal not only to fly-fishing enthusiasts but to anyone wanting to know more about Russia and what makes it reel and spin.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
