One Hundred Siberian Postcards Richard Wirick Telegram, 212pp, £9.99 ISBN 1846590159
When travelling, you often write a postcard to someone you love: Richard Wirick wrote One Hundred Siberian Postcards to a stranger he was waiting to love and travelling to meet, the Siberian baby who would become his daughter. The postcards are tender and complacent - Wirick's Siberia is an "unexplored, lounging maiden" whose "drape of icy hair" hangs down over "cowering Japan". He has a mystic's confidence in the power of his imagination to prise bits of truth out of the frigid landscape: to cry is "to work a lever that may be connected to nothing"; to hunt is "to inhabit the land of the dead".
He is amusing as well as agog, though, as he polishes up his local and literary finds into luxury language-objects. It's true that his sketches tend to be called "Paraclete", "Euphony", "Ouija" or "The Babel Face" - but their subjects are more varied than their captions. Turgenev and Flaubert sleeping in a haystack are jostled by the Mensk factory women who were paid in dildos during a Kremlin cash crisis; a shaman's critique of gambling is followed by a journalist's account of the moral paradoxes of the Chechen soldier. The voice that unites them is compassionate and literate besides being, at times, overlavish.
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