Sibirischer Schwindel. Zwei Abenteurromane

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"A delightful read ranging from alternative ethnokitsch to frontier capitalism."
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

"A marriage of orgiastic prose and sober observations."
Neue Zürcher Zeitung

Book 1: Platon's Tundra. 1990. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Moscow is besieged by bearded Rasputin clones and quack doctors offering a new gospel of salvation. After one séance, the American narrator and his local friend, Valera hatch a plan to search out the traces of shamanism in Yakutia - where the "true religion" lies. But when they arrive in the capital, Yakutsk, the coldest city on earth, they find Dodge City/Alphaville – a riot of wood shacks and rusted Soviet tenements, a brutalist dystopia plopped onto permafrost. They settle in at the All-Union Meat Packer's hostel, and get to work. The narrator, like the flaneur in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, wanders through the city in search of shamanic clues. Everywhere he find arctic natives trapped inside ill-fitting Soviet suits, trapped between forgotten traditions and a bastard modernity done dirt cheap. As his ethnographic methods turn ever more slapdash and gonzo, and Valera's creative debauchery overtakes the project, he finds shamanic energy in the libertine embrace of a most peculiar world.

Book 2: Diary of a Cowboy Outfit. Four years later, the narrator signs on with the Mercedes distributor in the Siberian oil region of Tyumen. The owner, Olaf, the reprobate son of a Geneva arms trader, has bilked his investors and bribed his way into local graces. He put the governor's kid in a Swiss boarding school. But he can’t control his local partner, Kolya, a former biathlete now dabbling in the dangerous jet fuel trade. The narrator with a fresh Oxford Phd on Hegel and Jesus - is charged with “building synergies” between the disconnected parts of the firm. The deadpan account that follows weaves its way through the art of contract killing, the love lives of truck mechanics, and the many temptations of tainted cash.