Book: The Dead Wander in the Desert
Autor: Rollan Seisenbayev
Country: Kazakhstan
Format: Audio
Narrator: Neil Shah
Length: 19h
Publication: 2019
I don’t usually write reviews of books I’ve abandoned, but this one has a too-cool theme behind it. This book really opened my eyes to something that I had no idea happened and can be considered the biggest man-made ecological disaster of the planet: the drying of the Aral Sea. The Dead Wander in The Desert is the story of a father and a son desperately fighting soviet bureaucracy to save the waters and their livelihood.
The Aral Sea was once the world’s 4th biggest lake. Since the 1960s it has lost 90% of its original size, leaving in its place a gigantic salt desert that only aggravated the dry climate of Central Asia. So how did this happen? With the expansion of the Soviet Union and the centralization of government under a Communist regime, the authorities in the area decided to divert the main rivers in the area to irrigate the growing number of cotton fields in the desertic areas in Central Asia. While the green fields transformed the desert, the lake agonized.
That’s the problem with hyper-centralized governments: when things work, everything goes well. When things go wrong, the consequences are catastrophic.
When I started reading it I wanted to see the area for myself, to have it clear in my head. I searched for the Aral Sea in Google Maps and dropped a pin in a large body of water.
I zoomed in with the peg man to see the street view and this is what exists in the area: kilometres and kilometres of pure mud where there used to be a whole sea. How did we not know this? It’s not even included in the list of worst man-made ecological disasters.
I think it’s because it happened slowly over the decades.
Now back to the book and why I didn’t finish it. Right in the beginning a translator’s note warns that this book is based on the oral culture of the Kazacs, and might deviate from what Westerners are used to.
Well, what can I say? It did.
I consumed this book in audio format and my first problem was the names. I’ve been reading a lot of foreign literature and I’m used to names in Arabic, Korean, Japanese, Hindi… So believe me when I tell you that I was completely lost with the Kazacs’ names and had a hard time keeping track of who was who. It doesn’t help that a lot of the male names sound like female names to my Latin ears and vice versa. Also, the translator left some terms untranslated, and those were supposed to be in a footnote, but that never showed up.
But anyway, I think is unfair of me to give up or criticize a book just because it has foreign names, and that’s not my main beef with this book. My problem was mostly with the confusing narrative. The book starts with a story in 1968 and then continues on and on without any other mention of date or year. I thought that we were still in the 60s, or the 70s until they started to mention facts that happened in the 90s. How did all this time go by?
Also, there’s a mention of an acid rain at the beginning of the book, which seems to have caused a lot of damage, but at the same time, everything is… fine? And the rain keeps going on for several chapters, but at the same time years go by?
But what really made me give up was the length – 19 hours! And the interminable discussions with soviet bureaucrats who could care less about a dam or the rivers that feed the sea, or even all the fishermen living in the area. I could take some 3 hours of this drama – but 19 hours? I can’t.
So I gave up after 7 hours. In the end, I gave it a 2.75 rating – meaning that I didn’t finish it, but other people might like it. I’m not counting it towards my Reading the World Challenge since I didn’t consume it in full, but it will show up as a suggestion for Kazakhstan in the blog.
Read at your own peril.
Here’s some resources if you want to know more about this tragedy:
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