Product Description
In 1960, the Aral Sea was the size of Lake Michigan: a huge body of water in the deserts of Central Asia. By 1996, when Tom Bissell arrived in Uzbekistan as a naïve Peace Corps volunteer, disastrous Soviet irrigation policies had shrunk the sea to a third its size. Bissell lasted only a few months before complications forced him to return home, but he had already become obsessed with this beautiful, brutal land.
Five years later, Bissell convinces a magazine to send him to Central Asia to investigate the Aral Sea’s destruction. There, he joins forces with a high-spirited young Uzbek named Rustam, and together they make their often wild way through the ancient cities—Tashkent, Samarkand, Bukhara—of this fascinating but often misunderstood part of the world. Slipping more than once through the clutches of the Uzbek police, who suspect them of crimes ranging from Christian evangelism to heroin smuggling, the two young men develop an unlikely friendship as they journey to the shores of the devastated sea.
Along the way, Bissell provides a history of the Uzbeks, recounting their region’s long, violent subjugation by despots such as Jenghiz Khan and Joseph Stalin. He conjures the people of Uzbekistan with depth and empathy, and he captures their contemporary struggles to cope with Islamist terrorism, the legacy of totalitarianism, and the profound environmental and human damage wrought by the sea’s disappearance.
Sometimes hilarious, sometimes powerfully sobering, Chasing the Sea is a gripping portrait of an unfamiliar land and the debut of a gifted young writer.
Chasing the Sea: Lost Among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia
Tags: Chasing, Christian, Tashkent, irrigation policies, Ghosts, Central, Lost
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I came to this book as someone who enjoys a good travelogue and has a long-standing general interest in Central Asia (I’ve read all the Hopkirk books). I have to say that despite Bissell’s cautionary notice at the beginning that he is not attempting history or reportage or travel writing, but that the book is “a personal, idiosyncratic account of a place and a people and the problems and conflicts they share,” this is one of the best modern travelogues I’ve encountered. Like all the best in the genre, it is outstanding precisely because it is such a personal work. Those interested in just the logistics of getting around and seeing the sights of Uzbekistan can always just pick up a good guidebook or three, and those interested in pure history have plenty of works to pick from. What Bissell brings is sparkling prose and a refreshingly open-hearted approach that admits his own limitations.
Bissell’s relationship with Uzbekistan began with an ignominious Peace Corps stint in the 1996, which saw him leaving after less than a year due to a mental breakdown. He returned in 2001, ostensibly to research and write an article about the decline of the Aral Sea, but in a large part, to confront his demons from that earlier experience. As the title foreshadows, he spends most of his trip bouncing around the country in an attempt to come to grips with it (indeed, it isn’t until the final 50 pages that he gets to the Aral and discusses its plight). Bissell isn’t on any particular itinerary so much as he wants to see the high points and take care of a few tasks (like smuggling money to someone). Because his Uzbek is shaky and his Russian is almost non-existent, he hires a 20-something Uzbek translator named Rustam. This college student peppers his speech with “dude” and “bro”, and is a Depeche Mode devotee, not to mention a bit of a ladies man. More importantly, he provides a forum for Bissell to bounce his impressions of the country, its Soviet legacy, and Islam, off of — and their disagreements are often highly illuminating.
Bissell travels around, from Tashkent to Gulistan, to Samarkand, the Ferghana valley, the T’ien Shan Mountains, and finally to Nukus and the Aral Sea. Modes of travel vary from local bus to hired car to Uzbek Air, and he experiences all the grime and discomfort such travel involves, including a harrowing encounter with some militia who stop their hired car, rather casually club the driver to the ground, take Rustam away for a full body search, and menace Bissell. Contrary to several reviews on Amazon, the most laughable of which reads that he “keeps the indigenous people of Central Asia at arms-length” Bissell interacts heavily with the people and places he visits. Upon arrival in a new place, the first thing he usually does is head out for an aimless hour-long walk to try and get a sense of the place.
Interspersed with his travels, Bissell recounts the political, cultural, and religious history of the country and the region. This ranges all over the place, from linguistics, to British and Russian Imperial history, ethnography, political economy, folk tales, internal Soviet politics, modern corruption, and all manner of things besides. These are generally largely cribbed summaries from other sources (listed in the bibliography), but Bissell does a nice job of putting it altogether in highly readable prose lightly sprinkled with jokes, asides, and personal commentary. Some might find this approach too freeform or meandering, but Bissell makes it work. It all wraps up with the sad tale of Karakalpak people, who used to fish and live off the Aral Sea and now live over 100 miles from its shore, and Bissell is left contemplating the rusting hulks of fishing vessels adrift in an ocean of sand. A brilliant piece of non-fiction from a very talented writer.
Rating: 5 / 5
_Chasing the Sea_ is one of the finer travel books I have read in some time. Author Tom Bissell set out originally to cover the tragic disappearance of the Aral Sea, a once large inland body of water shared by Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan that has been slowly choked to death since the 19th century by diversion of the water to grow cotton. Through the course of the book though he not only covers the Aral Sea but also relates his previous personal experiences with Uzbekistan – he served for a time as a Peace Corps volunteer – as well as his current travels. Though he left the Peace Corps, his love for this Central Asian nation didn’t leave him and he felt compelled to return, not only to his host family but to the country in general.
We learn that Uzbekistan is the second largest exporter of cotton in the world; though this achievement has not come without considerable cost (also amazingly enough they grow rice too). That this desert nation relies so heavily economically on such a thirsty plant is unusual, but Bissell details how the American Civil War cut off the supply of cotton, encouraging tsarist Russia to look for a new source. Demand for cotton only escalated during the Cold War. To grow the cotton, the Amu Darya River (known in antiquity as the Oxus) was diverted. This river, which forms part of Uzbekistan’s southern border and the primary source of the Aral Sea’s water, now no longer feeds into it at all. The formerly vast river, which once formed a huge inland delta, is now a mere creek at best as it reaches the receding shores of the Aral.
The Aral Sea’s certain demise sometime in the first few decades of the 21st century will have ugly consequences. As late as 1960 the Aral Sea was still the fourth-largest inland body of water in the world; now it is largely salt-crusted, dust-storm swept desert, much of this salt and silt poisonous thanks to decades of Soviet insecticides and dumped toxic waste. Moynaq, once a prosperous seaside community that had 40,000 inhabitants, was a favored beach retreat, and had a cannery that produced 12 to 20 million tins of fish a year; now over a hundred miles from the sea’s present (and still receding) shores, it is a near ghost town with no jobs to speak of. Fishing ships lie where they were abandoned, resting incongruously in sand dunes. Now that the Aral Sea has thus far lost over 70% of its water volume it no longer acts to moderate regional temperatures; summers are hotter and winters are colder (possibly ironically dooming the very crops that are being grown at the expense of the sea). The two dozen fish species that were once endemic to the Aral Sea are now extinct (though other species were later reintroduced to the northern Kazakhstan portion). The formerly unique desert forests that surrounded the lake are long gone as well.
More tragic still are those people who live around the Aral Sea. For over 600 years the Karakalpaks, a formerly nomadic people, have called these shores home. Now they are poor and unhealthy, as their industries – fishing, canning, and shipbuilding – have vanished and they suffer soaring rates of infant mortality, tuberculosis, and other diseases directly and indirectly related to the vanished desert sea.
I don’t however want to give the impression that this is a grim book, as there are many funny sections in it and Bissell is a talented writer. Nor is the Aral Sea the only subject covered. It is not even the main subject of this travel essay. Most of the book is devoted to Bissell’s travels, most of them with a young Uzbek named Rustam, hired as a translator but becoming a friend as he journeyed throughout Uzbekistan, from the T’ien Shan Mountains and Ferghana Valley in the far east of the nation through Tashkent, Samarkand, and Bukhara. Along the way the author relates many interest aspects of Uzbek history and culture, including the days of the Mongols, Timur (known in the West as Tamerlane), the Samanid dynasty of 819-1005 (during which time Uzbekistan became a center of Islamic learning, producing the great doctor ibn Sina, known to Westerners as Avicenna, revered in the West as late as 1700s, and al-Khorezmi, from whose name the word algorithm is derived), the Great Game (the 19th century Cold War of sorts between Russia and the British for supremacy in Central Asia), and the rule of Islam Karimov.
I found his portraits of the various cities the most interesting aspect of the book. Tashkent for example we learn is not only the most populous city in Uzbekistan but the most populous in Central Asia. It is also one of the most modern seeming Central Asian cities, as there is very little architecture older than about 50 years (owing partly to the fact that the city has been Russified since the late 19th century and partly due to a massive 1966 earthquake). Despite is appearances though this oasis city (its name means “Stone City”) is over 2000 years old, making it one of the oldest extant cities in the world. For much of its history it was a “sporadically independent city-state” surrounded by a famous high stone wall sixteen miles long (now completely gone) and controlled at times by such various groups as the Arabs, Chinese, Mongols, and the Kazakhs.
Bissell also has many asides in the book about Uzbek culture. He wrote of the very nature of Uzbek, an agreed-upon identity that is less than a century old; that in 1902 a Russian ethnographer noted that there were more 80 clan names in Uzbekistan, more important to them than any “Uzbek” identity. Indeed, Uzbek history in any form only stretches back to the 14th century, when a fierce group of nomadic invaders came down from the plains of southern Siberia.
A good book, just wish it had pictures.
Rating: 5 / 5
I’ll say this straight out at first so those that would stereotype me can go on to the next review. I am a Marine and have spent time in Central Asia. I consider myself politcially moderate. I learned about this book in Outside Magazine, which I subscribe to. Anyone who subscribes to or reads Outside knows its political bent, and so once you are familar with its platform, you can enjoy it.
This is an outstanding book. The author was a Peace Corps volunteer after college and clealry fell in love with his host country, Uzbekistan, and its people. This story is about his return trip to the country several years later to research and write a book about the impending death of the Aral Sea, once the world’s fourth largest lake. Mr. Bissell’s prose is very solid, descriptive, and unique. He is masterful storyteller. He is essentially fair and neutral in this book, presenting both sides of almost every issue he addresses.
The only annoying aspects of his book come when he simply cannot resist the urge to go on brief politcial diatribes, such as when he claims Michael Gorbachev was a great man who has received no credit and Ronald Reagan was a mediocre man who receives too much credit for winning the Cold War. (Mr. Bissell was betwen the ages of 6 and 14 when Reagan was President, but he feels knowledgeable enough to conclude that Regan had no effect whatsoever on the downfall of the Soviet Union – this is probably something he learned in a college poli-sci class). Fortunately, Mr. Bissell is very credible without resorting to these polemics, but it is these unnecessary and irrelevant tangents that are the sole weakness in this otherwise outstanding story about Central Asia and its people.
Mr. Bissell’s portrait is very accurate. Central Asia befits the saying, “It’s like another world,” because it is. But it is a stark and beautiful one, and although this region of the former Soviet Union is still struggling to lift itself out of the grave of its former oppressor, its people – an interesting mix of Asians, Muslims and ethnic Russians, are friendly and engaging. This book accurately captures these characteristics and stands as a fine civics and history lesson.
Rating: 4 / 5
Tom Bissell writes with such style and grace, using language with precision and wit, that he could probably tackle any subject and I’d find it fascinating. Here, he manages to write a book that crosses many genres: it is both a travel book and a history, a memoir and a reflective essay, and above all a triumph of narrative. Whether he is describing the beautiful women on the Tashkent subway, the ugly (and noble) Americans doing various kinds of business in Central Asia, the history of the Muslim former Soviet republics, the nuances of the Uzbek language, or, most importantly, what is the most profound ecological change on the planet — the disappearance of the Aral Sea — Bissell’s prose is clear, sharp, and funny. How he managed to remember tiny details escapes me, but this book transcends its subject matter. I mean, I never thought I’d be interested in Uzbekistan, but once I started reading the author’s adventures with his (very funny) translator as they investigate life there, I couldn’t put the book down. Details like a laundry detergent named Barf sparkle on every page. It’s Gen X ironic in a way but much more profound.
Rating: 5 / 5
What the holy moly is it with this book? A bunch of one-stars, and bunch of five-stars, and not much in between. I have a theory (I just read it). Here’s that theory: This is a book that takes its time to do what it does, and it doesn’t care to obey the accepted rules of nonfiction. I think Mr. Bissell, the author, very self-consciously tried to write a piece of Literature. I also think he cares more about the writing than the politics or journalysis. And you are either down with that or you’re not. You either like the writing or you don’t. Plenty of people are turned off by Art and Literature, and here’s a tome about a current-eventsy part of the world that has had little recent Art about it. Confusion! (maybe). I happened to really love Chasing the Sea, but what I’m saying is that I sort of see why a certain sort of person wouldn’t. I don’t think Bissell is a racist or white supremecist, though, as one reviewer does. That’s kooky. All Peace Corps volunteers will love it, though, as will fans of Theroux or Matthieson.
Rating: 5 / 5
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