Rollan Seisenbayev

The Dead Wander in the Desert is set in Kazakhstan mostly in the 1980s when it was part of the Soviet Union. It is quite the unexpected sweeping epic novel that includes elements of Kazakh folklore, world news headlines, and environmental assessment. It is focused on the impact of Russian bureaucratic decisions to divert water from two rivers that previously fed the Aral Sea. Seisenbayev structures this story around the lives of a fictional family – fisherman Nasyr, his wife Korlan, their son Kakharman, and their grandson, Beshir. Nasyr is initially a fisherman but when the sea recedes, he is appointed mullah. Kakharman attempts to prevent this disaster with help from a Russian scientist, but their efforts are in vain. The story features many real people in history.

One may call it environmental or historical fiction, but it is so much more. It is infused with Kazakh culture and history, and the way environmental decisions have changed their way of life. It repeats the stories told in the past by the Kazakh equivalent of bards. It is not a quick or easy read. It contains dream sequences and small elements of magical realism. Animals of the region are prominently featured. I had never read a Kazakh author before, or even a book set in Kazakhstan, so it was a jumping off point for me to research the history of this region. This book was originally published in 2002 in Russian. I read the 2019 translation to English by John Farndon and Olga Nakston.

Seisenbayev has crafted an ambitious story that relates the many unsuccessful efforts to fight against damaging policies and callous disregard for their ramifications. It is a tragedy for both the characters and the environment. It is long and includes a large cast. It contains excerpts from religious texts, poetry, philosophy, and political commentary. I appreciated learning more about our world and think this book deserves a wider audience. I consider it a modern classic.

Memorable passages:
“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.”

“Now in the fog of his memory, the old man saw the shadowy figures moving through the murk like the figures on the hills. There are many of them. They’ve been walking through the sands for a long time now—from the east to the south and to the west, into the cities, where they hope to escape starvation. Wretched, hungry, and thirsty, many fall and cannot get up. But nobody stops. Nobody pays attention. The dying don’t plead for help. They know there’s no help for them.”

“For centuries, they were happy to have the sea in their souls and in their hands. The fishermen were happy there was a sea, and the sea was happy there were fishermen. That’s how it was from time immemorial. So you can only imagine the depth of sorrow drowning the few coastal auls. It wasn’t wealth and possessions they had been robbed of. It wasn’t even their livelihoods and daily bread. It was their very souls.”
… (meer)

Obviously I picked this book up because I thought I might like it, but I've been completely blown away by how much I liked it. Rarely has a slow and meandering book like this been such a page-turner for me (indeed, perhaps this is the first time it's ever happened). Even though the story is full of sorrow and hopelessness, I found it addictive and enlightening about a country I knew little about, Kazakhstan.

In the main, this is a story about the man-made ecological disaster that is the disappearance of the Aral Sea. The Soviets decided to divert the grand rivers that fed this vast salt-water lake into irrigation canals, to water rice and cotton crops. The shoreline receded, exposing tons of intensely salty sand that blew away in the fierce winds, ruining the farmland that was barely viable in the first place. It would be bad enough if that were the only environmental disaster facing the region, but it's not: the salty sand is also full of highly toxic waste dumped into those rivers over decades when they still flowed; the nuclear weapon test facility in the east of Kazakhstan has left much of the land saturated with nuclear pollution, causing sky-high rates of birth defects, infant mortality and cancers; and the pesticides and fertilisers smothered over the cotton crops to make them grow at all leech their own toxicity into the environment. This book reads like an account of the apocalypse: the ocean's fish dying, the people all living with varying degrees of poison in their system, domesticated animals going wild and running off with feral packs, vicious sandstorms battering the fools still living around the sea…

The ongoing theme of this book is "man" thinking he knows better than nature, and as such destroying everything. The book does have religious overtones to it, with one of the main characters, Nasyr, being a mullah who prays continually to God to save Sinemorye, and wondering in despair whether it is God who has forsaken humanity, or humanity who has forsaken God. But you don't need to be religious to appreciate this book (I certainly am not); if you respect nature, and shudder in horror at how governments and corporations around the world wreak immense environmental destruction that would take nature thousands of years to recover from even if the damage wasn't being continually compounded on, this book will make an impact on you regardless.

The other running theme that I found interesting was the criticism of the Soviet authorities. Nasyr's son, Kakharman, begins the book as a low-ranking bureaucrat whose overriding goal is to convince the head honchos in Moscow to stop destroying the Aral Sea. There are other characters, too, like the scientist Slavikov and his son Igor, who share this goal. But the party apparatus is so stuffed full of careerists that would rather destroy entire ecosystems than admit to any mistakes, that this effort is basically futile. The book also talks about, or at least mentions, many of the horrific things that happened under Stalin's rule, like the Holodomor (where millions died in a man-made famine) and the Great Purge (where a similarly huge number were executed or sent to gulags, and since the authorities considered "criminality" to be hereditary, even children were mistreated in orphanages as "enemies of the state"). There are a number of flashbacks into the lives of minor characters to explore their lives during these times, and these passages are raw and moving. Despite a single brief section where America is described as like so amazing, they would never harm the environment! (bahaha, yeah ok) the criticism largely does not come from a place of, "and this is why the FREE MARKET and American imperialism are so great!" like Western criticisms of the USSR mostly do – instead it is with sympathy for the ordinary person, and especially the colonised person, as Kazakhs were by Russians. It's a very well-written book.

There are some reasons why you may not enjoy this book – it is quite long and mostly humourless, and it's not exactly a book where the animals are having a good time (although, as someone who hates animal cruelty and suffering in books, I wasn't "triggered" by this one – there's no real cruelty, although Kazakh society is definitely not vegetarian, and it's all of nature suffering here, not only the animals). The Kindle version seems bugged, and thinks the entire last 25% of the book is page 483, so be prepared for a book with a real length of ~600 pages or so. But man, what an entrancing 600 pages.… (meer)