Out of Reach

This book is the total opposite of the famous ‘Voyage autour de ma chambre’ by Xavier de Maistre, although initially Lotte Lola Vermeer explores the world without leaving her room. Google Street View enables her to travel cheaply and tirelessly at her desk, since modern technology allows us to go absolutely everywhere, from dazzling Alaska to icy Siberia. That at least is the idea on which the author was relying. On one of her many digital journeys, however, she discovered that Street View ends abruptly at apparently random places.

The ‘non-existent’ places she came upon stayed with her, so Lotte Lola decided to exchange her desk chair for a seat in a plane and set off in search of what cannot be found online, travelling straight to the digital end of Russia. There she met people of all types and talked with them about happiness and calamity, prejudices and internet videos, about belonging or not belonging somewhere and about what exactly we should now understand by the Russian soul.

‘Out of Reach’ is an ode to wonderment, a vivacious book about a lived experience that inspires us to resist fear of the unknown, indeed to seek it out.