New (Sort of) Travel Book: ‘Stalin’s Nose’
Travel Blog • Frank Bures • 06.10.08 | 4:04 PM ET
Full title: “Stalin’s Nose: Across the Face of Europe”
Author: Rory MacLean, also the author of “Under the Dragon: A Journey through Burma”
Released: Originally in 1992; reissued today with a new preface by Colin Thubron
Travel genre: Roots travel
Territory covered: Berlin to Moscow
Promo copy: “In Rory MacLean’s groundbreaking debut travel book, Winston the pig drops on to Uncle Peter’s head and kills him dead. Unwilling to be left alone in her house Aunt Zita, a faded Austrian aristocrat and a vivacious eccentric, hijacks her nephew and, together with Winston, sets out on one last ride. The Berlin Wall has fallen only weeks before and Zita is determined to reach across the reopened borders and rediscover her remarkable east European family. In a rattling Trabant the unlikely trio puff and wheeze across the changing continent, following the threads of memory. Zita’s relations—the angel of Prague, the Hungarian grave digger who buried Stalin’s nose, a dying Romanian propagandist—help tie together the loose ends of her life. They picnic at Auschwitz. They meet Lenin’s embalmer. They carry a long-lost corpse over the Carpathian mountains. Through war and revolution, decay and regeneration, ‘Stalin’s Nose’ is a surreal and darkly comic ride and a portrait of Europe like no other.”
Critical verdict: “By turns zany, lyrical, troubled, fantastical, Rory MacLean’s first book crashed through the norms of the genre to create a surreal masterpiece.” (Colin Thubron, from the preface to the new edition) “The most extraordinary debut in travel writing since ‘In Patagonia.’” (William Dalrymple)
Find it: Powell’s, Amazon, publisher
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