"In many states there exist icy territories, lands that for the greater part of the year are frozen over, dead," writes Ryszard Kapuscinski, musing about Siberia. "And yet it doesn't occur to anyone to frighten children with: `Wash your hands or they'll send you to Canada!'"
It is a quaintly absurd idea, at once amusing and revealing: the kind of observation that Mr Kapuscinski, a Polish journalist, makes effortlessly and to tremendous effect in "Imperium," a narrative of his travels through the former USSR.
"Imperium" is not a novel, history book, political commentary or travel guide, although it combines the best elements of all of these. In writing a book about his personal experiences in areas controlled by the USSR -- from his childhood in wartime Pinsk, Poland to his travels in the crumbling USSR in 1989-91 -- Mr Kapuscinski followed no formula. He just went wherever he could go without getting caught, looked with wide eyes and unquenchable curiosity at the world around him, and wrote down what he saw.
The result is a collection of simple, illuminating and poignant descriptions of a system doomed to crumble. Mr Kapuscinski does not burden himself with attempts to analyze or explain; his is the prose that describes the beautiful and horrific fireball of an atom bomb, as opposed to the scientific description of why it exploded. Strictly speaking, you may learn more from the latter. But it is the former that you cannot tear your eyes from.
"In Donetsk I saw a woman selling cow's hooves," he writes. "She stood there in the bitter cold, rubbing her hands together for warmth, and on the table before her lay several pairs of worn-down cow's hooves. I walked up and asked her what they were good for. `You can make soup out of them,' she answered, `there is fat in hooves.'"
From mundane and moving observations such as this to harrowing accounts of his exploits in such far-flung places as Nagorno-Karabakh, Magadan, Bukhara and Bashkiria, Mr Kapuscinski -- an accomplished journalist who has also written four other books -- sheds a brilliant and intensely personal light on the unsteady behemoth that was the Soviet Union.