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4.5
I’ve become an immense fan of the works (as well as the actual travel experiences) of Sylvain Tesson. This is the fourth work of his that I have read. I commenced with Sur les chemins noirs (French Edition), which concerns his 76 day hike, south to north, across France, from the Italian border to La Manche. Then I read Berezina (French Edition)), his bicentennial retracement of Napoleon’s disaster retreat from Moscow, in 1812, which Tesson undertakes (in winter – to make it a fairly precise bicentennial) on an Oural motorcycle, with sidecar. And most recently I read L'Axe Du Loup (French Edition), which was inspired by Slavomir Rawicz’s The Long Walk: The True Story Of A Trek To Freedom, a purported true story, subsequently proven false, of his escape from a POW camp in Siberia, and walk to the Bay of Bengal. There was certainly nothing false about Tesson’s journey (I’ve posted reviews of all three on Amazon.)Conceptually, Thoreau’s Walden immediately comes to mind; retreat to nature, shorn of modern “conveniences,” and mediate on the beauty of nature and one’s place in the universe. That comparison concerned a fellow Amazon reviewer friend, but he was reassured by Tesson’s rather dismissive quip about Thoreau: “the ‘preachy-preachy’ of a Huguenot.” Nonetheless, “Walden Pond” was one of the 60 books Tesson took with him for company over those six months of (relative) seclusion. Other authors included Romain Gary, Kundera, Youcenar, and Aldo Leopold, a naturalist more to Tesson’s taste, and whose name is on the first designated wilderness area in the United States, right here in New Mexico. Five of the 60 books are by one author, Ernst Junger, who regrettably I have not read. He also quips that it was not all Hegel, who does not go down well on a lovely snowy afternoon; he took a number of mysteries.Lake Baikal is quite a “pond”; in fact, due to its depth, it is the largest body of fresh water in the world, 700 km long, 80 km wide and a kilometer and a half deep. And from February to July, 2010, Tesson had a “front row” seat on the lake: a cabin, three meters by three meters, built (roughly) by geologists in the 1980’s. The cabin is now part of a nature preserve. Tesson’s principle improvement: two modern double-glazed windows. He first saw Lake Baikal in 2003, and fulfilled his dream of living along the lake, through three of the seasons, seven years thereafter.Tesson does not just sit in his cabin and gaze at his navel. He gets out and about, with his snowshoes, obligatory in the first months of his stay. In early March, when the temperature is minus 30 C, he walked 130 km from his cabin to the island of Ouchkany, out in the middle of frozen Baikal. He’d walk about 30 km a day, to the next inhabited cabin. Overall, it was a 10 day trip, with two days on the island. He routinely climbed the 1000 meter mountains behind his cabin. In the summer, he used his kayak. He is a naturalist in his own right, with beautiful descriptions of the natural world, including his beloved tit birds that kept him company in the winter.Wry and sardonic insights on the human condition abound. He pries up the linoleum in the cabin, noting how ugly and shabby most aspects of life are in Russia, remarking that esthetics was considered to be reactionary deviationism in the USSR. Tesson, in his (relative) isolation repeatedly critiques one of my personal bête noires: overpopulation. He quotes Claude Lévi-Strauss that the “worm in the flour” is the billions of people heaped on a planet too narrow for them, making all predictions for the future impossible. Tesson himself cannot console a couple who cannot get pregnant since he thinks of our human “termite colony.” Another of my bête noires, long before “fake news” became a routine expression, is the prominent American newspaper published in Europe. Two Dutch visitors leave a copy with him; he quotes the titles to some “news” stories, and concludes with a familiar formulation as to the paper’s best use: providing some cover for the sustenance he extracts from the lake. He provides some insightful comments on the various books he is reading, and has convinced me that I did to read Chateaubriand’s Vie de Rancé (French Edition). He understands his chief problem, and essentially states it: Must get out of the womb of the cabin and explore, otherwise, one’s state regresses, and the amniotic fluid of the womb is replaced by vodka! However, he provides no insights as to why he did not bring the love of his life with him to the lake, and she breaks up with him while he is there. Shared solitude, with a soul mate, would enhance any future visit to this vast body of water.I believe this is the only work of Tesson’s that has been translated into English, and it is entitled: The Consolations of the Forest: Alone in a Cabin on the Siberian Taiga. Meanwhile, I need no vodka. Seems that I am drunk on Tesson himself, and have ordered my fifth book: Vie a Coucher Dehors (Folio) (French Edition). 5-stars, plus for Tesson’s stay in the taiga, on the shores of Lake Baikal.
