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I kind of liked Kalder’s debut effort, Lost Cosmonaut. But Strange Telescopes is a much more engaging and mature work by a writer who’s clearly grown up and found himself in between books. This is Kalder without much of the glibness and arrogance that characterised Cosmonaut. The dark edge is still there, but it’s all the sharper for the subtlety.

Strange Telescopes is an examination of four Russian eccentrics. Actually, eccentric may be the wrong word. Kalder’s first subject, Vadim Mikhailov, who explores subterranean Moscow is clearly an eccentric, as is the film-maker obsessed with exorcism. But it’s hard to call Vissarion, a cult leader who claims to be a reincarnation of Jesus, merely eccentric. Kalder’s final study, Nikolai Sutyagin, who built a teetering wooden tower, seems the most normal of the lot. The common thread that Kalder finds is that all these men are engaged in the creation of their own realities. By accepting their realities for a while, Kalder is able to examine how it works.

It’s fascinating. Pretty much all the criticisms I leveled at Cosmonaut are fixed in Strange Telescopes. It’s a very good book and Kalder’s style is dry, witty, refreshingly dark and cynical. The pacing is problematic – Kalder’s apt to ramble around his subject for a while. The excorcist chapters dragged a bit for me. For the most part though, your patience is rewarded.

You shouldn’t believe anything that Daniel Kalder, author of Lost Cosmonaut says. Under a list of rules for the anti-tourist at the start of the book he states “The anti-tourist loves truth, but he is also partial to lies. Especially his own.” At times he veers off into the outright fictional, but it’s never entirely clear which bits of his stories are actually true. This is important, because otherwise, Lost Cosmonaut would be, by a very wide margin, the most depressing travel book I’ve ever read.

Kalder goes in search of emptiness, alienation and nothingness in the Russian Federation’s semi-automonous republics. He visits Tartarstan, Kalmykia, Mari El and Udmurtia – places I’ve never heard of and, based on his descriptions, would never want go. It’s hard to believe that Kalder, as he presents himself in the book, is anything other than a characature. He’s arrogant, crude, nihilistic and lazy – someone who’d be a nightmare to actually travel with. But it’s obvious that he knows far more about the Russian republics than he’s letting on and beneath the layer of existentialist crap he piles on, he seems to have a genuine affection for his subject.

It’s a bit like P.J. O’Rourke’s 1989 travel book, Holidays in Hell. Kalder would reject the comparison – in his rules for anti-tourists, he says that the only reason to penetrate danger zones is “vanity and a desire to brag”. Kalder doesn’t search out the dangerous – he finds interest in the banal and mediocre. What he’s really after are people clinging to the tattered edge of their identities, being consumed by Russia. Ethnicities on the verge of extinction, where people live lives of poverty and desperation. Kalder manages to criticise himself as an anti-tourist looking in on people’s misery, while skewering the cultural tourism of his contemporaries. Kalder’s no better than any of them and he doesn’t really pretend to be. It’s all a bit too post-modern, but identity is one of the few things that post-modernism actually does well.

I have no idea how accurate the book is in its depiction of these people, their culture or their countries. Kalder’s often quite funny in a mordant, dark and juvenile kind of way, but the whole effect of the book is rather depressing. I prefer my travel books a little less existentialist and a lot more straight-forward, but Lost Cosmonaut is actually pretty good. Just don’t go into it expecting it to be cheerful.