Daniel KalderFaber, £14.99
WHEN we think of Putin's Russia, images of sharp-suited crooks, beautiful tennis players and Stalin-worshipping grannies come effortlessly to mind. However, the collapse of Communism has produced oth
er, more monstrous and alluring growths, which Daniel Kalder tries to capture. Haunted by the grinding boredom of life in the "dreary scab-hole" that is his native Dunfermline, Kalder embarks on an "epic metaphysical-existential-cosmic quest".
Chance encounters take him from the sewers of Moscow to the empty vastness of Siberia, from rural Ukraine to the Arctic night of Arkhangelsk. Kalder's vivid, witty and sometimes poetic prose describes encounters with wonderful and frightening characters such as the Digger, monarch of the "Underground Planet"; Father Gregory, prolific patriarch and weekly exorcist; and Vissarion, traffic cop turned messiah. The author is fascinated by revolutionary acts of bizarre existential defiance, the strange alternative realities that these eccentrics have tried to construct.
On closer inspection, these perverse realities display glaring imperfections. The book is littered with non-events and anti-climaxes: the quest for Stalin's secret bunker ends knee-deep in Muscovite sewage; a tour through the Ukraine in pursuit of evil leads to a pigsty; Vissarion's Last Testament is a mishmash of established religions, Communist nostalgia and barely disguised anti-semitism. Indeed, it could be said that Kalder's travelogue is not strange enough: the characters he meets seem to correspond to established stereotypes of Russian irrationality. His Louis Theroux-like digging for the 'weird' sometimes smacks of exhibitionism. But such doubts are forgotten in the excellent conclusion when the author manages to track down the maker of the world's only wooden skyscraper.
Nikolai Sutyagin is not only behind the folly which threatens to flatten the surrounding village: he claims to be the Secret Architect of the Post-Communist World. Sutyagin's home is precisely that "strange, other place" that Kalder wants to live in.
Thus ends a testament to a unique moment of history when several remarkable individuals stepped into a "brand-new chaotic world and the roofs of their skulls flew off". By peering briefly into such "strange telescopes", Kalder shows a cosmopolitan curiosity and a sense of adventure lacking in much contemporary Scottish writing and confirms the exciting talent revealed in his Lost Cosmonaut.
The full article contains 393 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
