From Amazon
Subtitled "Unruly Living with the New Nomads of Central Asia,"
Grand Centaur Station is an irreverent tour of Kiev, Moscow, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkestan, Mongolia, and Siberia. Larry Frolick is an engaging travel companion, not afraid to be politically incorrect as he guides us through strange, sometimes beautiful, sometimes devastated, lands. Never content with playing the mute tourist, he constantly engages with people. In Kiev, he meets a gangster and a gorgeous museum director; in Mongolia, a drunken pack of Aussie tourists. On a train, he meets a Korean businessman and a Mongolian woman who commutes from Los Angeles to Ulan Bator to manage her father's slaughterhouse. In Tashkent, along the old Silk Route, he finds a market with a hundred different kinds of cherries. Throughout, he observes the crumbling of the old Soviet edifice and the shaky foundations of globalism, the deep past alongside the unknown future.
When meeting people and observing cultures, Frolick is excellent company; however, his intellectual conceit regarding nomads is all over the map and, like a road into the bush, appears to go nowhere. The writing itself, however, can be exquisite: "a vast vernal plain, italicized here and there with great strutting strands of red pine" or "Dawn, the colour of old honey." But his language is also adaptable--in the Ukraine and Moscow, the writing, like the air, is heavy, as if still-present Chernobyl isotopes and the Soviet mentality continue to weigh on the mind. All in all, a fine travel book on a region still little known (let alone understood) in the West. --Mark Frutkin
Book Description
With the grim determination of an unrepentant rocker, Larry Frolick sets off on a 12,000-mile trek across Central Asia, brooding over the fate of its lost civilizations. From Kiev, Crimean Tartary, and Moscow, through the nomadic homelands of Uzbekistan, Kyrgizstan, Tien-Shan, and finally into distant Mongolia and Siberia, he explores a continent on the brink of a meltdown, a strange world lit harshly by the red afterglow of the Soviet collapse.
His vivid account opens the door to a crowd of unlikely strangers: Mafiosi flatheads, salt-mine campers, fractious archaeologists, a conceptual artist who uses fresh corpses in his window displays, the very last of three Romanov princesses, an inept Chinese secret agent, a relentless Uzbek glottal probologist, disgruntled e-mail swains – and above all, Larissa, the moody Eurasian beauty who “just stepped out of a novel in her impossibly pointy Italian shoes.” With gleeful wit and a steely eye for detail, Frolick transports the reader to a world inhabited by a people burning with desire for something new to happen.
