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The Dead Wander in the Desert Paperback – September 17, 2019

by Rollan Seisenbayev (Author), John Farndon (Translator), Olga Nakston (Translator)
3.8 3.8 out of 5 stars 21 ratings
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Longlisted for the PEN Translation Prize.

From Kazakhstan’s most celebrated author comes his powerful and timely English-language debut about a fisherman’s struggle to save the Aral Sea, and its way of life, from man-made ecological disaster.

Unfolding on the vast grasslands of the steppes of Kazakhstan before its independence from the USSR, this haunting novel limns the struggles of the world through the eyes of Nasyr, a simple fisherman and village elder, and his resolute son, Kakharman. Both father and son confront the terrible future that is coming to the poisoned Aral Sea.

Once the fourth-largest lake on earth, it is now an impending environmental catastrophe. Starved of water by grand Soviet agricultural schemes, the sea is drying out, and the land around it is turning into a salt desert. The livelihood of the fishermen who live on its shores is collapsing. Vanishing with the water is a whole way of life. Despite overwhelming odds, Kakharman wages a battle against an indifferent bureaucracy, while Nasyr looks to Allah for guidance. Without the support of neighbors, who have lost hope, Kakharman must travail alone to rescue what literally gives them life. Even as the consequences mount, his quixotic fight proves more daunting. Even the sea itself seems to roil with distress.

In the face of despair, the unwavering convictions of these soulful individuals offer hope. Rollan Seisenbayev takes readers on a cautionary, elegiac, and deeply compassionate journey into what it means to be human―to care and to fight against devastating odds. May humankind heed his warning cry.

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Previous page
  1. Print length
    493 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publication date
    September 17, 2019
  4. Dimensions
    6 x 1 x 9 inches
  5. ISBN-10
    1542005396
  6. ISBN-13
    978-1542005395
  7. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Rollan Seisenbayev is Kazakhstan’s most celebrated and honored author. He played a prominent role in the emergence of Kazakh independence in the aftermath of the breakup of the Soviet Union and was a personal advisor to President Nazarbayev in the crucial early years of the 1990s. He is the author of The Return of Kazybek, Throne of Satan, and The Day the World Collapsed. Considered the founding novel of independent Kazakhstan, where it has sold over a million copies, The Dead Wander in the Desert marks the author’s English-language debut.

About the Translators

London-based John Farndon is a bestselling nonfiction author, playwright, poet, composer, and translator of literary works. Although he does not speak Slavic or Turkic languages himself, he works in close collaboration with native speakers. He has translated poets such as Uzbek Chol’pon, Kazakh Galym Mutanov, and Russians Alexander Pushkin and Vladimir Vysotsky. He translated the verse in Uzbek author Hamid Ismailov’s The Devils’ Dance, winner of the 2019 European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) Literature Prize, as well as books such as Anatoly Kucharena’s Time of the Octopus, inspired by the story of Edward Snowden.

Born in St. Petersburg, Olga Nakston is a native Russian speaker who now lives in London. She has collaborated with John Farndon on many translations of Russian literature, including Letters to Another Room by Ravil Bukharaev, the poems of Lidia Grigorieva, Tatyana Moskvina’s The Life of a Soviet Girl, and Rollan Seisenbayev’s The Dead Wander the Desert.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Amazon Crossing (September 17, 2019)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 493 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1542005396
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1542005395
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.5 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1 x 9 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    3.8 3.8 out of 5 stars 21 ratings

About the author

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Rollan Seisenbayev

Rollan Seisenbayev

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Rollan Seisenbayev is Kazakhstan’s most celebrated and honored author. He played a prominent role in the emergence of Kazakh independence in the aftermath of the breakup of the Soviet Union and was a personal advisor to President Nazarbayev in the crucial early years of the 1990s. He is the author of The Return of Kazybek, Throne of Satan, and The Day the World Collapsed. Considered the founding novel of independent Kazakhstan, where it has sold over a million copies, The Dead Wander in the Desert marks the author’s English-language debut.

Customer reviews

3.8 out of 5 stars
3.8 out of 5
21 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Steven Baumann
5.0 out of 5 stars Important translation at an important time
Reviewed in the United States on October 7, 2019
The Dead Wander in the Desert, Rollan Seisenbayev (John Farndon and Olga Nakston)

When I first heard about the Seisenbayev’s novel appearing in English I was captivated by the cover art. I imagine most people my age have seen a similar photograph of a boat in the waterless desert that was once the Aral Sea.

Reading literature in translation can be hit or miss, which is why I was intrigued by the collaborative approach employed by Farndon and Nakston. Farndon tells the story of Seisenbayev’s shaman telling him to find Farndon for this particular translation in my podcast. I think it ended up as a huge success.

This book is one you must spend time with. It is not something to be quickly raided, but rather carefully read - a great autumn read. It has poetry, long dialogues, and diversions through the vast plain that we now call Kazahkstan - a refreshing introduction to a fascinating country people don’t know a whole lot about.

As it continued, I felt like I was sitting and listening intently to Seisenbayev tell tales of Kazakhstan long into the night. The story challenges us with political, environmental, and religious questions such as this: “If the officials of Kazakhstan and the rest of Central Asia had sat at the same table and debated intelligently, they could’ve come to a decision and saved the sea. But now what? Each republic uses the wealth of the earth as if it’s their own property. We are not thinking about our children, not thinking about tomorrow. Everything is today, everything is now, now, now… and as many gold medals for your chest as possible!” Such passages resonate far beyond Kazakhstan.

All in all, it is a compelling book that can be taken as an entertaining novel, an introduction to central Asia, an exploration of Kazakhstan, or a unique look at central Asian Islam. It is poetry, politics, and the environment and much more which results in a really pleasant experience for the reader.

Thanks to Amazon Crossing for providing a review copy of this book. All opinions are my own.
One person found this helpful
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Efried
4.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant and Depressing
Reviewed in the United States on June 15, 2020
Verified Purchase
There's the Syr Darya, the Amu Darya, Colorado, the Missouri, and on and on. Rivers, rivers, every where. Dam 'em up divert the water, change the climate, ' KILL the Aral Sea and it's people and their heritage, Be a Communist, bring on the. NKVD and KGB, "enemies of the people" and more. Kill off a civilization to raise cotton and rice in the desert. ' Sound familiar America? China? Africa? Whose in line next to die for progress and Oligarch or five. We're Dead....
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DKW
3.0 out of 5 stars I gave it my best shot
Reviewed in the United States on September 29, 2019
Oh, dear. I have loved books that were serious literature, that were extremely long, that were set in cultures very different from my own. In all these cases, my curiosity was engaged and it carried me through. In this case, the book's length was daunting -- yes -- but what derailed me was my lack of connection to any characters.

The many, many, many untranslated words also stopped me cold. Yes, they were footnoted, but in an e-book that means going to the end of the book several times on each page, interrupting the narrative flow. Soon, I felt as if I were studying for an exam rather than reading for pleasure.

TL; DNF.
6 people found this helpful
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E.P. Clark
4.0 out of 5 stars Important Work with a Timely Message
Reviewed in the United States on September 17, 2019
In "The Dead Wander in the Desert," we see the final, painful days of the Soviet Union, juxtaposed with the final, painful days of the Aral Sea, as a once-bountiful land dries up and turns to a poisonous, salt-filled desert. The characters in the book fight to preserve the sea, but in vain: the central planners in Alma Ata (present-day Almaty) and Moscow refuse to undam the rivers running into it, dooming it and all who live in or by it to destruction.

The desiccation of the Aral Sea has been named one of the greatest natural disasters of the 20th century. In the past decade the water levels in one of its few remaining pools have been raised, but it is still far from revived. At the same time, it has received much less attention than more spectacular disasters than Chernobyl. In part that's probably because it happened out in Central Asia and primarily affected Central Asians, not Europeans. And in part that's because it's much less exciting than something like a nuclear meltdown. The destruction of the Aral Sea was the predictable result of specific policies, and took place over decades. There was no giant explosion, just a day-by-day incremental worsening of the problem, until one day the land was no longer habitable. Sound familiar?

"The Dead Wander in the Desert" is worth reading for its subject matter alone: it's both a memorial to a terrible disaster, and a clear warning bell of the danger of other disasters that are bearing down on the entire planet. It has a clear and unambiguous environmental message that some readers might find overbearing from an artistic point of view, but can't help but get its (extremely urgent) point across.

It's also worth reading as a window into a culture that most Western readers are likely to know little or nothing about. As well as an elegiac celebration of the Aral Sea in its final days, it's also a celebration of Kazakh culture. Western readers of the English-language translation are likely to find the culture simultaneously fascinating and off-putting: the book extolls both the close-knit Kazakh community around the sea and its close relationship with the land, and less attractive features of it such as animal sacrifice and the subjugation of women. As with other (post)-Soviet cultures, from a Western perspective there are no unmitigated good guys here. The Kazakhs were genuinely exploited and oppressed, and their culture almost destroyed along with their natural environment, by the Soviet regime. Some parts of the culture the book's characters are trying so hard to preserve probably do need to be tossed out into the dustbin of history. "The Dead Wander in the Desert" does not provide any answers to this thorny dilemma, but it would serve as an excellent jumping-off point for discussion in a class on environmental or post-colonial fiction.

Structurally and stylistically, the book is interesting but challenging. It follows along the events of perestroika more or less chronologically, but with multiple points of view and frequent flashbacks and digressions. This helps give it its epic breadth, depth, and feel, but requires attention from the reader to follow. It also has a tinge of magic realism mixed in with its purely realist accounting of perestroika and the world events surrounding it. It's not something to pick up as a piece of light, escapist reading. As with the subject matter, though, it would work beautifully as an assigned reading for a college-level class or book club that tackles serious topics and "big" novels.

The translation is well done, and the numerous end notes explaining cultural and historical events, as well as the Kazakh and Russian words that are left untranslated, will be very helpful for readers unfamiliar with perestroika, the USSR, or Kazakh culture.

"The Dead Wander in the Desert" is not an easy read, but it *is* a "big" novel in the Russian/Soviet tradition. Recommended for serious readers of literature in translation, especially Russian/Soviet/post-Soviet literature, and for readers of environmental and colonial/post-colonial fiction.

My thanks to NetGalley and Amazon Crossing for providing a review copy of this book. All opinions are my own.
7 people found this helpful
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Martin Hanley
1.0 out of 5 stars Dull
Reviewed in the United States on October 13, 2019
Hard to follow very dull
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