BOOK REVIEW / ESSAYS : Fascinating Message Never Quite Transcends Medium : BORDERLANDS <i> by Scott L. Malcomson</i> ; Faber & Faber; $22.95, 256 pages

You’re invited to review a book that sounds interesting: an examination of the particular elements of culture that develop in parts of the world that are buffered on either side by great civilizations but that have somehow managed to remain distinctly themselves. You look forward to reading. You sit in your chair. You turn the first page.

You realize that the entire text is composed in the literary conceit of a second-person narrative, as in, “Watching him from the kitchen window as you prepare coffee, you are impressed by his consistency.” You want to say, “No I didn’t and no I’m not.” You want to close the book, figuring you’ve paid your dues by having once read “Bright Lights, Big City,” which was written in the same irritating style. But the subject is fascinating and once the author gets out of himself (“yourself”) and into listening to the people he interviews in Romania, Turkey, Bulgaria and Uzbekistan, you decide to persevere. After all, you never know: The message might eventually overcome the medium. You want to like this book. You don’t.

*

Too bad, because journalist Scott Malcomson has done his homework and learned some of the languages involved, and has a keen ear for telling speech. On those occasions when he permits himself to fade into the background of a conversation or when he limits himself to un-self-conscious description, “Borderlands” lifts as if suddenly filled with helium.

Ruya, a Turkish woman, is filled with original insights about the movement toward the religious right on the part of some university students. “I know of not one example of a girl who came from a secularized family and became an observant Muslim,” she says. “They are all from traditional, provincial backgrounds. Obviously it’s much easier for them to rebel against their families along Muslim lines rather than, for example, through sexual freedom. All this ‘radical Islam’ among these kids is an easy form of rebellion.

“People like me, we rebelled against our parents by saying they were too moderate politically. These kids, they’re not rebelling against secularism. They’re rebelling against their parents. Why do they always say they’re ‘making a choice’? Because the state always says that fundamentalism is primitive and conformist, so they turn around and say they’re actually rebelling against the state by choosing Islam.”

Malcomson himself can be quite perceptive, if overly insistent, on matters of cultural relativity. “Remember that time is not the same for all people,” he instructs us, continuing, lest we’ve missed his point, “that different people think about time differently. . . . In industrial countries, at least, you can buy time, because as everyone says, time is money. In New York, for example, you might make in a day what in Pakistan you might make in a month. So you will try to leave Pakistan for New York, and thereby buy time for yourself.”

*

Unfortunately, the reader waits in vain for some overarching theory of marginalism that would expound a kind of common denominator to unite the experience of the four borderlands discussed. How did these places, and not others, avoid assimilation into the macro-societies that surround them? What did they sacrifice in favor of a persistent nationalism? What did they gain? Interesting as anecdotal parts of this book often are, they are never quite collected into a suggestive sum.

The concluding section on Uzbekistan is especially intriguing for a reader who knows little about central Asia, for it provides a concise historical context for the present-day issues facing the former Soviet republic. Long the trade link between China and Europe, the launch point for Genghis Khan, the intersecting point of Russia, Turkey, India and China, contemporary Uzbekistan faces a complicated and perplexing future. Malcomson does a good job in convincing us that we want to know more about the place--and then he plunges back into his maddening use of pronoun.

“Murat wants to show you everything (I never met the man!), and over several days he takes you to farms and offices (Not me!), to monuments. One day you borrow a motorcycle with a sidecar (Wrong guy!) and tool around with Murat and his wife.”

And so forth. It’s a bad choice by a good writer, and it diminishes what would otherwise be a superior book of travel analysis.