The Gentleman from Finland: Adventures on the Trans-Siberian Express

What a fun and invigorating book! I read it on a train ride and was laughing out loud! (It made my seat mate move). I loved the humor and the crazy characters that the author encountered and felt like I knew them all at the end of this travelogue. I have passed the book on to two different people who are avid travelers or readers...I do not know who has it now, which is a VERY good sign. Read this book this summer!

Set in 1987, The Gentleman from Finland: Adventures on the Trans-Siberian Express is a memoir chronicling mishaps that escalate almost into the realm of the bizarre. The author, a short, swarthy Mexican-American-Russian-Jew, boards what he believes to be the Trans-Siberian Express yet discovers two days later that he is on the wrong train, traversing the Soviet Union with a voucher that mistakenly identifies him as a Finn. He speaks almost no Russian, and is lost amid a strange land - an old woman steals his shoes, smugglers stash contraband under his bunk, and a beautiful woman rescues him from disaster yet mysteriously keeps reappearing, leading him to fear that she is with the KGB. Sometimes wryly humorous, other times fraught with tension, The Gentleman from Finland is a truly unique travelogue offering a memorable snapshot of one man's encounter with a nation.

Don't be mislead by the title: the "Gentleman from Finland" is in actuality a Silicon Valley baby-boomer whose childhood fascination with trains results, through a series of misunderstandings, in this ill-prepared and torturous journey across the desolate Russian wasteland on the Siberian Express. Through his adventures and extensive background reading, the author makes the history, geography and politics of this obscure region not only palatable, but genuinely entertaining. It isn't necessary to be an armchair travel buff to appreciate this fast-moving view of a thoroughly unfamiliar part of the world or to identify with the traveller's thoughts and emotions as he gamely makes the best of his uncomfortable situation.

I have read a number of travel memoirs, but rarely have I read one as funny and well-written as The Gentleman From Finland. The book works on a number of levels: as a laugh-out-loud tale of an innocent abroad; as an insider look at a Soviet Union that no longer exists; and as a poignant rumination on families and the past. Goldstein is particularly adept at capturing the absurdities of the situations in which he finds himself, whether it is seeking something to eat on the train or trying to get a room at a hotel where he is not due until the next day and thus does not exist. Thank god that Goldstein was willing to take this trip on the reader's behalf, because God knows I wouldn't want to do it. But I'm sure glad he did and chose to write about it.

The Gentleman From Finland is one of the most enjoyable books I've read lately. It was sometimes hilariously funny (people looked at me strangely when I was laughing out loud on the bus), at at other times poignant. The author's descriptions of the people and places enabled me to see what he saw and feel what he felt. I shivered with cold in Novosibiersk and wondered at the Munchkin army in the hotel lobby. The characters he met on his travels were memorable. The desolation of the Russian landscape and the realities of life in 1980's Soviet Russia were chilling. And the personal evolution of the author during this trip made it an almost spiritual experience. I highly recommend this book to anyone who likes humor, travelogues, trains, or Russian history.