# Read the first page of The Consolations of the Forest by Sylvain Tesson & Linda Coverdale Read the opening of The Consolations of the Forest by Sylvain Tesson & Linda Coverdale free, no signup. Six months alone in a Siberian cabin become a study of solitude, time, and freedom. - Page: https://uncovered.ink/read/the-consolations-of-the-forest-sylvain-tesson-and-linda-coverdale - Genre: Nature memoir - Year: 2013 - ISBN: 9780141975498 - Read it blind (cover and title hidden): https://uncovered.ink/?b=9780141975498&s=read-page - Buy: https://bookshop.org/a/125786/9780141975498 - Borrow: https://search.worldcat.org/search?q=9780141975498 ## The opening @@CHAP@@ FEBRUARY @@CHAP@@ The Forest The Heinz company sells around fifteen kinds of tomato sauce. The supermarket in Irkutsk stocks them all and I don’t know which to choose. I’ve already filled six carts with dried pasta and Tabasco. The blue truck is waiting for me; it’s −26º F outside and Misha, the driver, keeps the engine running. Tomorrow we leave Irkutsk and in three days will reach the cabin, on the western shore of the lake. I must finish my shopping today. I decide on Heinz Super Hot Tapas. I buy eighteen bottles: three per month. Fifteen kinds of ketchup. That’s the sort of thing that made me want to withdraw from this world. @@CHAP@@ 9 FEBRUARY I’m stretched out on my bed in Nina’s house on Proletariat Street. I like Russian street names. In the villages you’ll find a Labour Street, an October Revolution Street, a Partisans Street, and sometimes an Enthusiasm Street, along which trudge grey-haired Slav grannies. Nina is the best landlady in Irkutsk. A former pianist, she used to play in the concert halls of the Soviet Union. Now she runs a guest house. Yesterday she told me: ‘Who’d ever have thought I’d wind up cranking out pancakes?’ Nina’s cat is purring on my stomach. If I were a cat, I know whose tummy I’d snuggle on. I’m poised on the threshold of a seven-year-old dream. In 2003 I stayed for the first time at Lake Baikal. Walking along the shore, I discovered cabins at regular intervals, inhabited by strangely happy recluses. The idea of going to ground alone in the forest, surrounded by silence, began to intrigue me. Seven years later, here I am. I must find the strength to push the cat off. Getting up from a bed requires amazing energy. Especially when it’s to change a life. This longing to retreat just at the point of achieving your heart’s desire … Certain men do an about-face at the crucial moment. I’m afraid I might be one of them. Misha’s truck is packed to the point of bursting. It’s a five-hour drive to the lake across frozen steppes, navigating over petrified wave crests and troughs. Villages smoke at the foot of hills, wreathed in mists trapped in the shallows. Faced with visions like these, the Suprematist painter Kazimir Malevich wrote: ‘Whoever has crossed Siberia can never again aspire to happiness.’ At the top of a ridge, there it is: the lake. We stop to have a drink. After four brimming glasses of vodka, we wonder: how in the world does the shoreline manage to follow the water so perfectly? Let’s get the statistics out of the way. Baikal: 435 miles long, 50 miles wide, almost a mile deep. Twenty-five million years old. The winter ice is over three and a half feet thick. Beaming its love down upon the white surface, the sun doesn’t give a damn about such things. Filtered by clouds, patches of sunshine slide in a gleaming herd across the snow, brightening its cadaverous cheeks. The truck ventures out onto the ice. Beneath the wheels, it’s two-thirds of a mile down. If the truck plunges through a fissure, it will topple into a black abyss. The bodies will sink in silence. Slow snowfall of the drowned. The lake is a godsend for anyone who dreads decay. James Dean wanted to die and leave ‘a beautiful corpse’. The tiny copepods called Epischura baikalensis1 will clean the bodies within twenty-four hours, leaving only ivory bones on the lake bed. @@CHAP@@ 10 FEBRUARY We spent the night in the village of Khuzhir on Olkhon Island, pronounced ‘Olkrhone’, Nordic style, and we’re heading north. Misha isn’t a talker. I admire people who keep quiet; I imagine their thoughts. I’m on my way to the place of my dreams. Outside, the atmosphere is bleak. The cold has let its hair down in the wind; wisps of snow skitter away from our wheels. The storm wedges itself into the cleft between sky and ice. I study the shore, trying not to think about living for six months in the requiem mass of those forests. All the ingredients of the imagery of Siberian deportation are there: the vastness, the livid cast of the light. The ice rather resembles a shroud. Innocent people were dumped for twenty-five years into this nightmare, whereas I will be living here by choice. Why should I complain? ## Books with a similar feel - [In Order to Live by Yeonmi Park & Maryanne Vollers](https://uncovered.ink/read/in-order-to-live-yeonmi-park-and-maryanne-vollers.md) - [A Woman in the Polar Night by Christiane Ritter](https://uncovered.ink/read/a-woman-in-the-polar-night-christiane-ritter.md) - [Fresh Air Fiend by Paul Theroux](https://uncovered.ink/read/fresh-air-fiend-paul-theroux.md) - [Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel](https://uncovered.ink/read/prozac-nation-elizabeth-wurtzel.md) - [Wild by Cheryl Strayed](https://uncovered.ink/read/wild-cheryl-strayed.md) - [Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer](https://uncovered.ink/read/braiding-sweetgrass-robin-wall-kimmerer.md) --- Source: Uncovered (https://uncovered.ink). A short sample shown for reading and discovery. Rights holders can request removal at https://uncovered.ink/takedown.