Jeffrey Tayler’s River of No Reprieve at Yahoo! News

In this week’s “Traveling Light” column at Yahoo! News, I take a look at Jeffrey Tayler’s latest literary journey, River of No Reprieve, which takes the author down the waters of Siberia’s remote Lena River, home to sprawling wildernesses, dying villages and a brief white-summer season known for its wind storms and freezing temperatures.

For Tayler, part of the appeal of the region is its obscurity. “Historians and writers have long occupied themselves with Moscow and Saint Petersburg, written about the Volga and the steppes, and described parts of Siberia along the railway, he writes. “But the Lena? Its shores have known no chronicler, its villages no hallower in verse, its deeds and deaths no novelist. Lives had begun and ended there — no more.”

Accompanied by a misanthropic 37-year-old Russian guide named Vadim, Tayler journeys down the Lena in a custom-designed riverboat, exploring remote outposts that have not advanced much past their original frontier condition (“We’re entering the twenty-first century losing our phones and electricity and still fighting bears!” exclaims one frustrated villager). Along the way, the author recounts early Cossack explorations of the Lena, ruminates on the grim gulag history of the region, and discovers quirky ethnic and cultural enclaves — from tidy ethnic Germans in Nyuya, to beautiful Eurasian girls in Verkhnemarkovo, to cheerful Yakut Baptists in Yakutsk.

For my full review of the book, including a Q&A with Tayler regarding traveling in deepest Siberia, click here.