Reeling in Russia

In the summer of 1996, award-winning journalist Fen Montaigne embarked on a hundred-day, seven-thousand-mile overland journey across Russia, fulfilling a long-standing desire to explore the backwaters of the vast Russian countryside. Traveling with his fly rod, he began his trek in northwestern Russia on the Solovetsky Islands, a remote archipelago that was the birthplace of Stalin's gulag. He ended his travels half a world away as he fished for steelhead trout on the Kamchatka Peninsula, on the shores of the Pacific. In between he journeyed alone through the eternal Russia of log cabin villages and endless taiga, completing a trip few other Westerners have made. A former Moscow correspondent who speaks Russian, Montaigne trekked to some of the world's most beautiful rivers in pursuit of exotic game fish. Much of the time, his efforts were thwarted by poachers or his own incompetence. But his tales of visiting these far-flung rivers are memorable, and at heart Reeling in Russia is far more than a story of an angling journey. It is a humorous and moving account of his adventures in the madhouse that is Russia today, and a striking portrait that highlights the humanity and tribulations of its people.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.