Fatland’s anecdotes are rich and revelatory ... Sovietistan blends complex history with Fatland’s own clear-eyed reporting, the devastation of the Soviet era always in the background (and sometimes the foreground). With the Russian Bear once again on the move, she plumbs the high cost of dictatorships and the human yearning for self-determination. Sovietistan is a perspicacious, vital book about little-known places and real lives; it deserves a wide readership.
All credit...to Norwegian social anthropologist and author Erika Fatland, who may have titled her central Asian travelogue Sovietistan, but who treats each of this clumsily named collective with care and attention. Part travel diary, part sociopolitical analysis, Sovietistan seeks to keep in mind the region’s ancient history—dictated to Fatland with metronomic accuracy by identikit tour guides in the various city museums—while probing what may lie ahead ... Fatland’s eye for the distinct nature of these countries—seamlessly conveyed in Kari Dickson’s translation—is critical.
Her best reporting is about Turkmenistan, a country largely closed to independent travellers and which she presents in a refreshing three-dimensional way ... Another highlight is her description of the world’s largest walnut grove, in Kyrgyzstan ... This oasis of authenticity is a welcome contrast to the phoney falconry she caustically depicts a few pages earlier, with bored golden eagles inflicting gory deaths on terrified captive animals. But there is a lot of padding. The reader ploughs through potted histories ranging from Genghis Khan to British imperial anxieties in India. Fatland’s pen nib all too often turns to lead ... The biggest problem is Fatland’s own presence on her pages, which is intrusive and unhelpful.
...engaging ... She conjures the laden caravans of the old Silk Road, pyramids of saffron at the Siyab market in Samarkand and dust on the fabled Pamir highway. Her biographical sketches of the giants of history are strong ... Kari Dickson has fluently translated the book. Fatland produces some excellent phrases — that still-burning methane crater ‘looks like a glowing mouth' ... like most books, Sovietistan is too long.
... offers an opportunity for sustained reflection on the region ... Despite the title, Fatland is careful to position the Central Asian countries as more than just post-Soviet ... There are many memorable anecdotes and vivid portraits of the people [Fatland] meets ... highlights what an ethnic mosaic the region is ... It is to Fatland's credit that she eschews many of the clichés of Post-Soviet travel writing. Invoking ruins has, since the end of the Soviet Union, become something of a platitude in writing about the region. Ruins do feature in Sovietistan, but Fatland draws our attention to remnants of much older civilizations ... The potted histories that are interspersed throughout Fatland's anecdotes add another layer to the book. Brief but enlightening summaries of the Great Game, the Silk Road, and Central Asia's many contributions to the Islamic Golden Age give context to Fatland's journey and hammer home the fact that places such as Merv, perhaps unfamiliar and obscure-seeming to many Anglophone readers, were once of vital importance; teeming centres of learning and trade ... what is so refreshing about Fatland is her predilection for deliberate moments of bathos and deconstruction ... Fatland never comes across as sneering, as travel writers often can, just amused and occasionally exasperated.
A colorful, often bizarre, sometimes grim journey through five Central Asian nations that emerged from the breakup of the Soviet Union ... A lively, if rarely cheerful, travelogue that fills a yawning knowledge gap for readers concerned with international affairs.
... a translation of a Norwegian original which won the 2015 Norwegian Booksellers’ Prize for Nonfiction. Not, it must be said, that anything in the book gives that away: if the goal of translation is to be transparent, then Kari Dickson must be at the peak of her craft. It’s entirely colloquial; some references to Oslo aside, the only thing that gives Fatland away as something other than the otherwise expected Anglosaxon travel-writer is that in the book she communicates in Russian, German and Finnish ... a series of wide-ranging if not always connected vignettes ... Fatland has an eye for the absurd...But she also has a soft spot for ordinary people making do in difficult circumstances, as well as extraordinary accomplishments in extraordinarily difficult circumstances ... Fatland is an engaging writer with an excellent translator. Completeness would have been an impossible objective. Fatland chooses the individual tesserae of her mosaic well: stand back and a picture comes into view. Those new to the region can do far worse than start with her.
