The Lost Heart of Asia

by Colin Thubron

  “ People seem irresistibly compelled to confide in this gaunt, tanned man, with a face like a Crusader, and he listens without comment to the women moaning about their husbands and the young men who want to save his soul.”

  “Oh dear,” I hear Thubron saying patiently, before returning, muttering: “I wonder what all that was about.”

  He doesn’t seem particularly unhappy, perhaps because his bad experiences can be absorbed into his passion for words.

  His looks, his old-Etonian charm and his rarity value as a single, heterosexual man of fifty-five have made him something of a pet with London ladies of a certain age. For the moment Thubron is attending their dinner parties, but soon he will decamp to Wales to start on his next novel. He alternates rigidly between travel writing and fiction, but says he prefers the latter. “With a travel book you are having to be true to something. The satisfaction of writing it seems to be diluted by the constant research back to your notes. With your novel, it’s yours right or wrong, and that brings a peculiar satisfaction.”

  Thubron’s rights and wrongs manifest themselves in brief, “rather dark and sad studies of personal relationships.” He admits, without being asked, that his novels (the last was Turning Back the Sun) are “deeply autobiographical.” The idea for each novel festers for years and then emerges in “a short, sharp and obsessive four months.”

  He doesn’t seem particularly unhappy, perhaps because his bad experiences can be absorbed into his passion for words, just as he chooses the most arduous journeys knowing they will make the best copy. “I think I need some sort of constriction to kick up against, so that every conversation is a mini-triumph.”

  The problem for Thubron is that he is running out of places where such challenges exist. “I feel I have come to the end of a certain pattern, that Central Asia has completed a jigsaw and in a way I’d rather not know where I’m going next. Once I start to know I think I’ll start getting enthusiastic, and the next place will start saying ‘Me, me, me’ and not letting go.”

  A Critical Eye on The Lost Heart of Asia

  “Thubron generally sits in the front passenger seat, sets out alone across ruined heaps of Islamic tiling and fretted brick, and observes his anxious, ignorant and opinionated hosts from the corner of the room. His judgements are careful, and many of his landscapes precisely drawn . . . . The Lost Heart of Asia remains valuable, as a triple portrait in specific, historical time: of Russians outside Russia, a racist, but romantic imperialist people; of the native inheritors to whom they have (more or less) handed their power; and of the Islamic revivalists, some of whom are planning the next new world.”

  —The Observer (London), December 11,1994

  “As a travel writer Thubron is not memorably crotchety like Paul Theroux or vividly opinionated like Martha Gellhorn. He is evenhanded and courteous, even to bores and lushes. But he is persistent in his curiosity, following obscure leads and dangerous roads (as in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan) to find the true heart of Asia.”

  —Washington Post Book World, November 20,1994

  “This is magnificent stuff. The ferocious synthesizing force that is the Thubron bandwagon leaks vast amounts of substantial information on the obscure and secret worlds of nations, families and individuals, with all the seeming insouciance of a great entertainer. . . . What makes Colin Thubron so good? High readability for a start—as much of the pleasure principle as the spirit of scientific enquiry. He is a great user of human Alan Hollinghurst (“the Historian’s face cracked into a smile which survived there a senselessly long time later, as if he had forgotten it”.) Another contributory factor is his thoroughly lived-in knowledge of the subject.”

  —The Scotsman (Edinburgh), October 29,1994

  “Interweaving the history of the area with conversations he has along the way, Mr. Thubron gives a strong overall impression of the surface lethargy, the shallow economy, the pervasive unfocused homesickness of the new republics, all filtered through his lightly melancholy gaze. In spite of always being with local people, he can seem distant and evasive to them—not the Estonian they take him for, but the former Etonian, goading people by judicious silences into digging their own graves. Yet in culling vital memories, he has kept faith with one of the bewildered men he meets, who says: ‘Tell me about my country. You’ve read books. What happened here?’”

  —New York Times, December 4,1994

  “This is the Soviet Union dissolved, chickens 200 roubles where they were two, and Thubron padding about the Islamic republics bemused (frequently bullied into vodka’ed drunkenness), overhearing frail domestic relationships, prodded by mercenary louts, and slipping his unchewable shashlik into the bushes. He is a mobile ear to listen again and again to the soft muddled narratives of real lives everywhere.”

  —The Guardian (London), December 2,1994

  “Thubron’s grasp of this fantastical past is impeccable, and he weaves its mysteries with modern images into a dazzling embroidery . . . . Thubron’s talent for conversation gives his travels a tangible, moving intimacy, and despite his foreignness . . . he is able to draw confessions and opinions from an astonishing spectrum of people One of the striking aspects of The Lost Heart of Asia is, of course, the exceptional beauty of Thubron’s writing. The profound, metaphorical quality of his style, the poetic surgeon’s eye with which he dissects and reconstructs his surroundings, the humanity with which he interprets everything he sees, are deeply embedded in every line. His skill is in making reading an act of discovery, through which the dark, magical places he visits are genuinely brought to life.”

  —The Times (London), October 20, 1994

  “No-one could better Colin Thubron’s doleful elegance as recorder of the sad and potentially dangerous plight into which Central Asia has since fallen Thubron is happiest when he is saddest, picking his solitary way among poignant ruins and meditating on the fate of civilisations.”

  —Financial Times (London), October 15,1994

  “It was the ideal moment for a travel writer. Thubron found a people who were openly asking fundamental questions about themselves: Who were they? What kind of government did they want? Should they follow Turkey’s secular lead and form a new pan-Turkish block? Should they ally with the mullahs of Tehran and look to Islam for their answers? Should they revert to the certainties of Marxist-Leninism? Characteristically, Thubron refuses to give any answers. He has always been the most detached of modern English travel writers, a cool Anglo-Saxon observer who travels alone, has no ties and no loyalties, and who never judges. In this book, as in its predecessor, he simply presents a series of lives pinned dispassionately to paper like the butterflies of a Victorian colletor.”

  —The Independent (London), October 2,1994

  “Although the heroic age of travelers in Central Asia has gone forever, this book will still deserve, for the intense beauty of its prose and the observant clarity of its vision, to stand alongside the best of those classic travel writings of the past.”

  —The Sunday Telegraph (London)

  Read On

  Author’s Picks

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  This record of a journey taken in 1933-1934 through Persia and Afghanistan has been called the Ulysses and “The Waste Land” of travel writing. It is a brilliant collage of humorous vignette, scenic evocation, and some of the most precise and beautiful architectural descriptions in the language. Its author died in 1941 at the age of thirty-five, his boat torpedoed in the North Sea.

  The Children of Sanchez by Oscar Lewis

  An anthropologist’s tour de force that documents the lives of the four sons and daughters of a patriarchal family in a Mexico City slum. Recounted in their own words, it opens the reader into a world with its own bitter logic and survival structures.

  Night of Stone by Catherine Merridale

  The most penetrating and imaginative study of Russia’s twentieth-century nightmare that I know. This is a humane and unsentiment
al book, of great authority, and a beautiful inquiry into the nature of guilt and grief.

  A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  The first of a projected trilogy recording the author’s journey on foot from Holland to Istanbul in 1933-1934. An ebullient, richly described narrative of a young man’s initiation into the glories of prewar Europe.

  The Tree of Man by Patrick White

  Surely Australia’s Book of Genesis, this prodigious novel portrays an ordinary family trying to carve out a life in the Outback. It invests the course of everyday events with the epic grandeur of nineteenth-century Russian fiction.

  The Day of Judgment by Salvatore Satta

  The only work of an Italian lawyer who for thirty years recorded his memories of Sardinian life as lightly veiled fiction. The stories of priests, peasants, aristocrats, and incarcerated women flow at last into an austere magical realism. The manuscript was found among the author’s papers after he died in 1975.

  The Lycian Shore by Freya Stark

  In this study of a still-tranquil land— Turkey’s southwest shore—the author evokes ancient history with a lyricism all her own, fusing landscape, Greek ruins and the classical past into a narrative of unique enchantment. A quiet classic.

  Stalin’s Nose by Rory MacLean

  Rory MacLean’s first book crashed through the norms of travel writing to create a surreal masterpiece. It describes a journey through Eastern Europe in 1989-1990 in a decrepit Trabant, with an eccentric aunt and a Tamworth pig. Their crazy progress becomes an allegory of the tortured countries through which they go.

  Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

  In this hypnotic fable, Marco Polo describes a succession of visionary cities, suggestive of dreams or disordered states of mind, to the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan. It becomes a haunting guide to imagined ways of being.

  Read on

  Have You Read?

  More by Colin Thubron

  SHADOW OF THE SILK ROAD

  Shadow of the Silk Road records a journey along the greatest land route on earth. Out of the heart of China into the mountains of Central Asia, across northern Afghanistan and the plains of Iran and into Kurdish Turkey, Colin Thubron covers some seven thousand miles in eight months. Making his way by local bus, truck, car, donkey cart and camel, he travels from the tomb of the Yellow Emperor, the mythic progenitor of the Chinese people, to the ancient port of Antioch—in perhaps the most difficult and ambitious journey he has undertaken in forty years of travel.

  The Silk Road is a huge network of arteries splitting and converging across the breadth of Asia. To travel it is to trace the passage not only of trade and armies but also of ideas, religions, and inventions. But alongside this rich and astonishing past, Shadow of the Silk Road is also about Asia today: a continent of upheaval.

  One of the trademarks of Colin Thubron’s travel writing is the beauty of his prose; another is his gift for talking to people and getting them to talk to him. Shadow of the Silk Road encounters Islamic countries in many forms. It is about changes in China, transformed since the Cultural Revolution. It is about false nationalisms and the world’s discontented margins, where the true boundaries are not political borders but the frontiers of tribe, ethnicity, language and religion. It is a magnificent and important account of an ancient world in modern ferment.

  “An intrepid, resourceful and immensely talented writer . . . . An uncommonly interesting and rewarding book . . . . All in all, a splendid book.”

  —Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World

  “A sublime travel writer in the tradition of Freya Stark and Patrick Leigh Fermor. . . . [Thubron captures] the most evocative details in the landscapes and in the lives of ordinary people with lyricism, compassion, and wit.”

  —Boston Globe

  IN SIBERIA

  As mysterious as it is beautiful, as forbidding as it is populated with warm-hearted people, Siberia is a land few Westerners know, and even fewer will ever visit. Traveling alone, by train, boat, car, and on foot, Colin Thubron traversed this vast territory, talking to everyone he encountered about the state of the country, whose natural resources have been savagely exploited for decades; a terrain tainted by nuclear waste but filled with citizens who both welcomed him and fed him—despite their own tragic poverty. From Mongolia to the Artie Circle, from Rasputin’s village in the west through tundra, taiga, mountains, lakes, rivers, and finally to a derelict Jewish community in the country’s far eastern reaches, Colin Thubron penetrates a little-understood part of the world in a way that no writer ever has.

  “Thubron’s ability to see, feel, analyze, to blend the present and the past, makes In Siberia more than a travel book. His keen eye, like a great photographer’s, sees more than an image; he captures the essence of Siberia.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  AMONG THE RUSSIANS

  Here is a fresh perspective on the last tumultuous years of the Soviet Union and an exquisitely poetic travelogue. With a keen grasp of Russia’s history, a deep appreciation for its architecture and iconography, and an inexhaustible enthusiasm for its people and its culture, Colin Thubron is the perfect guide to a country most of us will never know firsthand. Here, we can walk down western Russia’s country roads, rest in its villages, and explore some of the most engaging cities in the world. Beautifully written and infinitely insightful, Among the Russians is vivid, compelling travel writing that will also appeal to readers of history and current events—and to anyone seeking connection with one of the world’s most enigmatic cultures.

  “Superb . . . . One of the best books on Russia to appear in years.”

  —New York Times

  “Colin Thubron is an ideal guide. Well informed about icons, architecture, and history, he is also wonderfully articulate . . . especially in descriptive passages, the language becomes a grave and stately music.”

  —Washington Post Book World

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  Also By Colin Thubron

  NONFICTION

  Mirror to Damascus

  The Hills of Adonis

  Jerusalem

  Journey into Cyprus

  Among the Russians

  Behind the Wall

  In Siberia

  Shadow of the Silk Road

  FICTION

  The God in the Mountain

  Emperor

  A Cruel Madness

  Falling

  Turning Back the Sun Distance

  To the Last City

  Credits

  Cover photograph © Magnum Photos

  Copyright

  A hardcover edition of this book was published in 1994 by HarperCollins Publishers.

  P.S.™ is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers.

  THE LOST HEART OF ASIA. Copyright © 1994 by Colin Thubron. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. N o part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, N Y 10022.

  First Harper Perennial edition published 1995. Reissued 2008. Reprinted in Perennial 2001.

  The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as follows:

  Thubron, Colin.

  The lost heart of Asia / Colin Thubron.

  p.cm.

  Includes index. ISBN 0-06-018226-1

  1. Asia, Central—Description and travel. 2. Thubron, Colin, 1939– —Journeys—Asia, Central. I. Title.

  DS527.8.T47 1994

  915.804’2—dc20

  94-12971

  ISBN 978-0-06-157767-3 (pbk.)

  10 11 12 ID/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3

  EPub Edition © June 2011 ISBN: 9780062104724

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