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	Scribner Lost Cosmonaut: Observations of an Anti-Tourist By Daniel Kalder Scribner 288 pages. $13

Rough Guide

The anti-tourist looks for misery as a relief from comfort, Daniel Kalder writes. Where else to find misery but in four desolate corners of the former Soviet Union?

By Aaron Hamburger
Published: September 8, 2006

Tourism these days can be a miserable experience. Waiting in endless lines to get into must-see museums. Eating at overpriced traps for out-of-towners or guidebook-sanctioned local eateries where most of your fellow patrons are holding the same guidebook as the one in your hand.

Daniel Kalder, Scottish author of the travel narrative "Lost Cosmonaut," has had enough. "These days the world is infested with Europeans: you can't go anywhere without encountering German backpackers or twenty-strong mobs of Italian teenagers in bright yellow jackets," he laments. Not for him are the glories of the Great Wall of China or the Taj Mahal, which he describes as "banal as the face of a Cornflakes packet." Kalder is looking for uncharted ground, places that aren't flooded with Western tourists and are therefore Real. He joins a long line of writers (Paul Bowles, Jack Kerouac, Bruce Chatwin) who have combed the globe for a refuge from civilization.

Kalder's innovation is that he isn't expecting to find Shangri-La. Rather, the author, who bills himself as an "anti-tourist," is looking for misery as a relief from comfort. At the beginning of the book, he presents an anti-tourist manifesto, the fancifully titled "Shymkent Declarations." A few samples:

"The anti-tourist does not visit places that are in any way desirable.

"The anti-tourist eschews comfort.

"The anti-tourist embraces hunger and hallucinations and shit hotels. ...

"The anti-tourist holds that whatever travel does, it rarely broadens the mind."

Where else to find discomfort, hunger and shit hotels but in the far-flung corners of the former Soviet Union? And so Kalder takes us to four desolate destinations: Tatarstan, home to one of Peter the Great's collections of deformed babies in bottles; Kalmykia, ruled over by a dictatorial chess enthusiast who apparently claims to have been abducted by aliens; Mari-El, one of the last bastions of paganism on Earth; and Udmurtia, home of Mikhail Kalashnikov, inventor of the AK-47, as well as a local ethnic population of Udmurts who have been so brutally repressed that their presence is almost impossible to detect.

Kalder makes good on several of his promises as an anti-tourist, immersing himself in bleakness and serving up some engrossing yet terrifying details. (Along the way, he gets off a few good digs at The Moscow Times.) From the drug wars of Tatarstan to the mail-order brides of Mari-El to the mammoth factories and empty train carriages in Udmurtia, Kalder paints a stark picture of unremitting dreariness. Imagine sitting down to dinner at the Sputnik Cafe in Kalmykia: "The meatballs were cold and full of gristle and very hard to swallow, but they were by no means the worst thing. The worst thing was the 'special Kalmyk tea,' which was a lukewarm mixture of grease, tea, and salt." The astoundingly ugly and downright weird minutiae of daily life in "Lost Cosmonaut" at first made me wonder if the places described in the book actually exist, but some cursory Internet research revealed that indeed they do.

It's a shame that Kalder's writing, line by line, isn't equal to the task of fully rendering the grimly fascinating terrain he tries to describe. The following sentence is typical of his lack of concern for syntax: "He was a thin young man in a cheap suit with melancholy eyes." Amazing how a suit can have eyes. Worse, his tone veers wildly from good-natured bombast to irony to hard-bitten realism to mawkish pathos. Sometimes he reaches for a grandiloquence that comes off as unintentionally comic, for example, "suddenly the pall of reality fell over me," or "Kalmykia was a place trembling with anxiety." His insights are often shallow, as in the passage beginning with the apparently unintentional rhyme, "The crowd was proud." He then continues: "That their tiny republic could produce such music, such beauty! It validated their existence, too."

AP Kalder's journeys as an "anti-tourist" took him to such unlikely destinations as Kazan, in Tatarstan, about 700 kilometers east of Moscow.

Most of the time Kalder aims for a jokey irony that sometimes comes off mean, as, for example, his gratuitous swipes at a portly policeman in Kalmykia, "a piggy bastard with an impertinent grin and beady eyes" who "pointed a grubby sausage-finger at me." Then there's the overfriendly man in Tatarstan of whom Kalder says: "He looked like a trouser pilot to me. I suspected he wanted to stick his cock in my ass."

Kalder claims he isn't mocking the people and places he sees, but in fact mockery is the basis of his project. There's a reason tourists don't visit pockets of horrific poverty, and it's not simply fear; it's because playing the tourist in places like these is at worst shameful and at best in bad taste.

Finally, a local actress in Udmurtia confronts the author head-on: "You see our poverty, you see how little we have. You think it's pathetic, don't you? That's why you want to take pictures: to record our squalor. ... You deny it, but I see it in your eyes. We are pathetic; this is pathetic. You are laughing at us."

Kalder, taken aback, writes, "My brain had seized up and I couldn't articulate a defense of myself. All I could do was say no." In an aside to the reader, Kalder says that because he has lived in Russia for years, he is no longer appalled by poverty, that it is "very banal" to him. A bit like the banality of the Taj Mahal, perhaps. "It wasn't true: I wasn't laughing at anybody," he cries out. "But how could I explain myself? She wouldn't have believed me." No, and we don't either. "Anyway, what did it matter if one person chose to dislike me? Not at all. She was welcome to her hate." "Hate"? Is "hate" really the right word here? Or is it "indignation"? These are the kind of subtle choices of language that are necessary not only for a writer but also for a sentient critic of the human condition.

So if the object isn't to muckrake or laugh, then what is all this supposed to add up to? Toward the book's end Kalder comes to an earth-shattering realization, "The universe is huge and you are a speck of dust. Furthermore, soon you'll be dead. ... All your struggling, your striving, gone -- puff -- like a fart in a sock. ... Personally, I think it's something of a relief. However, it's better to forget and keep acting as if you do matter. ... And I think that's the problem the denizens of these lost zones have ... They don't have the illusion of connectedness to the hum, the throb, the buzz of the modern world, or a sense that their history is of any significance." In other words, all we are is dust in the wind.

The best parts of "Lost Cosmonaut" are when the author gets out of the way and just shows us what he's seeing. Oddly enough, according to Kalder's anti-tourist credo, this is exactly what he has been trying to do: "The anti-tourist is humble and seeks invisibility." Perhaps he'd have been better off sticking more closely to this worthy self-stated goal.

Aaron Hamburger is the author of the short-story collection "The View From Stalin's Head" and the novel "Faith for Beginners."

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