Bridge over nothing

Subhash Jaireth is both a writer and a geologist. This collection of essays draws inspiration from the international roaming his geological work has involved. Most of the essays explore memories of the Soviet Union, where he studied, or ancient landscapes in Australia, where he has lived and worked since the 1980s, with personal detours to India and Spain.

Jaireth’s writing is not merely an accessory to his scientific career, and not just because he studied literature as well as geology. Jaireth is a writer for the same reason he is a geologist: his chief interest is world-building. Whether reminiscing about the metro stations of Moscow that he knew as a student, or describing the mingling of eucalypt woodlands and suburbia in Canberra where he now lives, Jaireth’s instinct is to read, in intensive detail, the relationship of the physical environment to its historical-cultural legacies. In Jaireth’s world, any physical feature, be it a hillside or an avenue, is incomplete without its imprint on the imagination. These essays recount journeys through places Jaireth has known intimately. In the best passages, there is quiet drama in the struggle to reconcile the disarrangement of physical places, their cultural meanings, and what the author remembers (or thinks he remembers).