Two Stops Past Siberia

The Lost Heart of Asia, Colin Thubron

The Lost Heart of Asia details Mr. Colin Thubron’s exhaustive trip through the former Soviet Central Asian republics in the early 1990’s, amidst the fresh wake of the Union’s collapse.

Mr. Thubron makes his way through each of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. As a self professed historian, he embarks on an aggressive campaign to find even the most remote ruins of ancient capitals, does his best to track down old and vanishing  populations, like Mennonites in Uzbekistan, and the last, isolated speakers of Sogdian. “I listened almost in disbelief,” Thubron writes upon finding them, “This, I told myself, was the last, distorted echo of the battle-cries shouted 2500 years ago by the armies of the Great Kings at Marathon and Thermopylae, all that remained from the chant of Zoroastrian priests, or the pleas of Persian satraps to Alexander the Great.”

This passage, like many in the book, overwhelm the reader with Mr. Thubron’s deep passion for history, as well as the imagery with which he sees it, and the poetry with which he presents it. Furthermore, Mr. Thubron never fails to elucidate what he finds with informative, and equally readable accounts of the textbook histories for the places he finds. When is enjoying his journey, he is the most delightful of companions.

Unfortunately, this is not the majority of The Lost Heart of Asia. The bulk of the book involves the narrator engaging in Central Asian hospitality, of which he views through a decidedly negative lens. While at first, his impressions of the people, (“They seemed like nomads still: predators and opportunists, whom history had caught in mid-migration.”) come across as simple first impressions, as the book wears on, his consistent diminutive negativity begins to wear on the reader. His cities are faithfully “bland,” and his people invariably “trudge,” food is inevitably “guzzled,” and the opinions of his subjects are unfailingly “naïve.” While always critical of Soviet propaganda, in describing these places, it is as if Mr. Thubron finds nothing to discount old Western propaganda against the Soviet Union itself.

But with these perspectives in mind, for better or for worse, Mr. Thubron presents an incredibly detailed account of a fascinating part of the world, during a unique, and utterly fascinating period. The Central Asia of today is much different from what he saw, when “overnight, as in some schoolchild’s fantasy, the teachers had gone away, leaving behind the message that the lesson was wrong.” The picture he paints is a well-informed time capsule of this moment.

He probed people constantly with questions about how Islam will fare (“our women will not wear the veil,” they all say, “this is not the Islam of Iran.”) and whether they had really believed in communism. Then, as now, people maintain things were better under communist rule, but unlike now, they often describe a yearning for a pan-Turkic society, perhaps as a new structure to fill the void.

Keeping in mind that much of Mr. Thubron’s negativity reflects our own Western perceptions of the former “Evil Empire,” his subjects are engrossing, his journey inspiring, and his writing simply superb.

Highly Recomended