Lost Cosmonaut: travels to the republics that tourism forgot Daniel Kalder Faber & Faber, 224pp, £12.99 ISBN 0571227805

The fictional travelogue Molvania: a land untouched by modern dentistry - one of the bestsellers of 2004 - has a lot to answer for. A parody of travel guides to cheap weekend des-tinations, it took its readers on a voyage around a make-believe eastern European country that was, its authors claimed, "the birthplace of the polka and whooping cough". Lost Cosmonaut is its bastard son: the places Daniel Kalder visits are real enough, but he refuses to find anything interesting about them. He may think this is hilarious, but in fact it merely emphasises how misguided his book is.

Kalder, according to the dust jacket, has lived in Moscow for nine years. He mentions his "office job" but never explains what it is or why he went to Russia in the first place (nor why, nearly a decade later, he still can't speak the language properly). A few years ago, he decided he would visit some of the weirdest places in the former Soviet Union, and so embarked on a tour of four of Russia's self-proclaimed autonomous republics: Tatarstan, 500 miles to the east of Moscow; neighbouring Mari-El and Udmurtia; and Kalmykia, a southern region bordering Astrakhan on the shores of the Caspian Sea.

Kalder aims to embrace the concept of "anti-tourism". In an opening manifesto, he states that "the anti-tourist holds that whatever travel does, it rarely broadens the mind". His is an anarchic, sideways-on attitude: rather than seek out the things that he's supposed to - museums, cathedrals, parks, theatres - he will try to visit the backstreets, concrete blocks and bad circus shows featuring dwarves. As an anti-tourist, Kalder will embrace "hunger and hallucinations and shit hotels".

Ah, yes, the shit. Is it just me or was every other word "shit"? I counted 22 examples, but it seemed like a lot more. This is where Lost Cosmonaut comes crashing to earth. There is no real passion in Kalder's boredom. He wants to hate everywhere, be miserable and revel in some sort of postmodern existentialism, but the most he can say is that everything is shit. It is exasperating: many readers will pick up the book hoping to discover something about these obscure places. We do get some historical detail, facts and figures, but it is always presented in an ironic tone, as if we should feel bad for wanting information. Reality is not the point of Kalder's narrative. He just wants things to be "crap".

Often, however, the locations thwart him. Travel cliches exist for a reason. In Udmurtia, birthplace of the inventor of the AK-47, he ends up trying - and failing - to track down Mr Kalashnikov. Mari-El's only claim to fame is its pagan ancestry, which still flourishes today. So Kalder tracks down the practising Chief Druid and performs sacrifices in the woods with him (only to discover that the Chief Druid's apartment is packed with cuttings by journalists who have done exactly this).

The whole thing is incredibly frustrating. Kalder's student humour occasionally prompts a belly laugh, but more out of desperation than anything else. He claims, tongue in cheek, that this is supposed to be "an existential voyage to the heart of non-being" rather than "a book that would reveal the fascinating world of Russia's European rep-ublics". The problem is that, however embarrassingly cliched and obvious, I would far rather have read the latter.

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