DISCOVERIES

“Gloom,” “puritan disgust,” paranoia: These are some of the emotions novelist-journalist-traveller Colin Thubron experiences in his journey through Siberia, an area that covers a staggering one-twelfth of the Earth. These are the happy vibes. Mostly, what Thubron feels is fear. The Trans-Siberian railroad, built in 1891, goes no faster than 50 decrepit miles an hour, and this alone is frightening. But Thubron seems determined to dive into the most violent, crimson, grave-robbing aspects of Siberian history. His visit begins with the site of the house where the Czar and his family were killed in 1918. He visits prison camps, cemeteries, the graves of the Russian intelligentsia. He steps carefully and with distaste through peat bogs and urban squalor. He drinks vodka with homeless men, listens to an 87-year-old woman describe her experience in a labor camp, visits old men full of shrapnel, Old Believers, shamans and Yakuts. He is shown, somewhat against his will, the embalmed and disinterred body of the Ice Princess of the Altai. Everyone shouts at him: a lone British man stepping in all the wrong holy places. What a relief after all the cheerful travel books and brave adventure stories! A small human voice that makes the dark woods pulse with magic.

FASTING, FEASTING; By Anita Desai; Mariner Books: 240 pp., $13, paper

“A koel was calling in the neem tree . . . its voice was the voice of summer itself, along with the blaze and lethargy of the season, and then just a part of the background, a thread in its worn, faded fabric.” Anita Desai applies most of her prodigious talent in this novel to character, so this passage from “Fasting, Feasting” is unusual, but it conveys the whir in the background of the story, the buzz, the chant, the obeisance--generation after generation to the traditions in India that keep women little more than property in the ledger--and the shame that is used like a whip to shepherd the wayward. Certainly, in some families, it all works; the arranged marriages, the dowry, but in this Indian family, where PapaMama is always one word, theirs has become a single voice of unwavering, tyrannical authority. Uma, the plain older daughter (in their desperation to marry her off, PapaMama are swindled out of two dowries until they finally give up and put her to work at home) is a sweet, childlike woman. They will not let her go out; they force her to do all the work raising the precious baby boy (her brother). The boy, Arun, is pounded into his textbooks until he is accepted to the University of Massachusetts, where alienation and shame and fear all but overtake him. Desai’s story shows how very simple it is to abuse children in the name of tradition.

THE OTHER REBECCA; By Maureen Freely; Academy Chicago Publishers: 306 pp., $23

A couple of times each year, a writer decides that he or she loves a particular novel so much that they will model their own novel upon it. It worked for Michael Cunningham with “The Hours,” based on Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway.” More often, it fails because the pitch is off. The old plot and the new plot fall out of sync. Too much control is marshaled to drag them in line, like wrinkled tracing paper over an original drawing. “The Other Rebecca” is based on Daphne Du Maurier’s 1938 novel “Rebecca.”

A young American writer, slightly lost after her first book (interconnected short stories, always the brunt of jokes) falls in love with a famous older writer who has been accused of responsibility for the suicide of his first wife (also a writer, named Rebecca). Sacrificial lamb No. 2 goes to live at the family manor in England. It’s a bit of “Jane Eyre” (ex-wife’s ghost in the attic), Sylvia Plath’s and Ted Hughes’ real life story and every novel that ever touched on the subject of how writers destroy each other. Ooooh, they’re so slimy and duplicitous. And the poor, innocent children. And the evil maiden aunt. Maureen Freely allowed herself an extra portion of camp, making the whole endeavor less earnest than amusing. *

OUTFOXED; By Rita Mae Brown; Ballantine: 396 pp., $24

There’s no law that says all southern writers must be compared to Flannery O’Connor or Carson McCullers or Eudora Welty. Let’s just say that Rita Mae Brown is Antarctica to O’Connor’s North Pole. O’Connor’s is the demented, desperate but ultimately more human South; Brown’s is the chubby-cheeked South of matriarchs and manners. “Outfoxed” is, well, it’s cute--Disney-cute. So if you can’t stand cute, just stick to “Member of the Wedding.”

“Outfoxed” is built around a Virginian fox hunting club in a small town. The hunt master is a salty, straight talking, seventysomething Aunty Mame named Sister Jane, and she has to choose between a wealthy Yankee and a philandering Virginian as her successor. The animals in the novel talk (and they are not as smart as the rabbits in “Watership Down”). The foxes have names and they talk, as do the hounds, the horses and the house cats. “Sister is one of us,” Athena the owl tells Inky the gray fox cub. “Peter Wheeler was, too. . . . 1/8T 3/8hey live within Nature’s rhythms and despite human frailty they are respectful.” It’s unusual, these days, for a writer to include animals on their human stage. It’s risky and therefore admirable. If only they weren’t so damn cute.