The Lost Pianos of Siberia

The title made me interested, so I listened to the audiobook. I never knew that I wanted to learn about Siberia until I was read this book. It didn't make Siberia less mysterious, but it did help me understand why Siberia is mysterious. There was bits about pianos and lots about Siberia. I enjoyed that combination.

3.5 stars. This wasn't quite what I had been expecting, and I think some of my disappointment stems from that. I was hoping for an exploration of Russian musical history. Roberts admits she is not musical herself and honestly her purpose, to find lost pianos in Siberia, is easy to forget about at times. Although there are a few interesting musical stories, I found Roberts' writing much more engaging when she was writing about nature. As a wildlife journalist, who's original reason for travelling to Russia was to find tigers, she perhaps would have been more comfortable with that as a topic? It was an entertaining travel memoir, just not as musical as I was hoping it would be.

This worked for me.

Sophy Roberts gives us a half travelogue / half history book as she makes her way around some of the most remote places of Siberian tundra, in search of a piano for a supremely talented girl in Mongolia whose family Roberts had befriended when she was a journalist working in the region.

Her historical segues are relevant and informative without going too into the weeds and the writing is warm, simple, and elegant. The dots Roberts connects around the importance of the piano in Russian life during the instrument's boom in the 19th century and how their collective disappearance is a microcosm of Siberia's colonization and obscured history are fascinating.

Roberts went into her journey with a romantic lens. It'll be an adventure to a remote land with a lost history and I'll be searching for pianos! What a story this is going to be! But throughout the book, as she meets people and hears their stories, as she actually stands seemingly at the edge of the world overlooking the Bering Strait, she realizes that there is a difficult duality to Siberia: in its vast snowy remote stillness lies therein a unique awe and beauty that has to be experienced to be believed, but also the terrible and suffocating darkness of a brutal history. A core message of the book is that one can usually learn the most about the history of a place from what has been lost, and the author understanding the meaning of her piano search through that framework comes as a sort of revelation later on, which I greatly enjoyed.