Book Review: The Fault Line

The Fault Line: Traveling the other Europe from Finland to Ukraine by Paolo Rumiz, translated from the Italian by Gregory Conti

This was a beautiful book, the kind of travelogue where you want to read slow and savour the language as a metaphor of the author’s sensory experiences. This is the kind of travel experience that isn’t only about checking off remote destinations on a bucket list. 

Paolo Rumiz incorporates history, culture and characters along with the more obvious landscapes, foods and languages. It’s not a tourist guide, it’s a travel guide. 

Even in translation the beauty of his language comes through. I was captivated from the beginning when he describes light:  "Asiatic sunlight, wispy and warm, apricot-coloured…” (page 14).   

Explaining his exit from the European Union, a few miles further along, he writes: “…the air was tainted by that unmistakable blend of saccharine Catholic respectability and Protestant “busyness” that poisons my world.” (page 18)

Rumiz travels vertically along the east/west divide of Europe. From the far northern areas near Murmansk, down to Odesa of the Black Sea. He shuns the shiny and the posh and revels in the rustic and authentic … even when it’s ugly… like the bitter north of Russia. Helping a drunk man up, he writes, “I sense that I’ve arrived in a tasteless, colorless world of desperation.” (page 28)

I appreciated his views on Kaliningrad … K city he calls it. Once Königsberg, also known as Kant’s city, it’s now the capitol city of Russia’s western enclave. Rural areas still harbor ghosts from past battles. (Which I was privileged to cycle through back in 2019).

Rumiz is the type of traveler who views guidebooks as “pages of nothing. Only banalities…. Yes, it’s better to travel asking information from the people you meet …” (page 79)

When he reaches Ukraine, and this was written back in 2012, he quotes Maxim, a man he meets in Odesa. Maxim’s words are a chilling prediction of what’s happening over there right now. Maxim says, “If Ukraine stops being what it has been for centuries, that is, a buffer, to enter into an alliance with the West, all hell will break loose.”  (page 243)

Back in 2012, the journey taken by Paolo Rumiz was a safer trip. I wonder if such a vertical journey from north to south could be managed now. That border line has erupted into a war zone. Reading this book helped me appreciate the nuances of this historical fault line.