River of No Reprieve (Book Review)

I just finished a very remarkable adventure story/commentary/travelogue about a corner of the world that very few people (unless you are unfortunate enough to live there) know about:


River of No Reprieve: Descending Siberia's Waterway of Exile, Death, and Destiny by Jeffrey Tayler
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Quite an enjoyable and informative book about a remarkable journey down Siberia's river Lena. Down in the sense of going downstream, perhaps 'up' in the sense that the journey is south to north.

More important Jeffrey Tayler brings his unique insight as an American resident of Russia (Moscow area) to the historical stories of this area. Like his earlier work Siberian Dawn, it is as much focused on the trials and daily challenges of people as his own challenges from the journey.

The people in this book were in many cases outcasts from the "good, old" USSR as exiles and criminals real and imagined, but managed to cobble together a life that had a certain kind of comforting (for them) stability, but when the USSR fractured apart, so did the tenuous support lifeline the people in this area depended on, and mostly their lives have been in a downward spiral since. To say that the capitalists of the post-USSR era were not interested in this 'internal' penal colony and purgatory would be a kind way of expressing the truth.

Tayler's writing is both colorful and very descriptive. Let me quote just one (abridged) passage:

"Around midnight the sun slipped behind the pine-serrated ridges. The orange sky shaded into lavender, glowed phosphorescent green for two or three hours, and then, finally, lightened into the rose of dawn. {...} At times we heard the echoing roar of a brown bear (one night a hungry male torn open an anthill fifteen feet from our tents and gobbled up its inhabitants); [...] Was it any wonder that shamanism orignated here, among Yakuts and Evenks dwelling alone, scattered throughout the wilds, for months on end, with their reindeer? In the fine, tremulous light, trees and stones, rivers and brooks, all acquired spirits, all breathed with a hidden life force." [from Chapter 9]

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