cover image Siberian Dream

Siberian Dream

Irina Pantaeva. William Morrow & Company, $23 (309pp) ISBN 978-0-380-97554-9

Veronica Webb, Naomi Campbell, Kate Moss--all the supermodels have caught the writing bug, usually to unimpressive effect. Not so, however, with Waris Dirie (see review below) or Pantaeva--born a Buryat Eskimo in the Siberian city of Ulan Ude (pop. 300,000)--whose delightful, moving and at times harrowing saga of her struggle to make it as a fashion model in the West rarely descends into falseness or cliche. ""My people were nomads for a millenni[um],"" Pantaeva writes, ""and in time their blood compelled me across the world."" As a child in the U.S.S.R., Pantaeva repeatedly rebelled against the Stalinist educational system, while struggling to maintain a strong bond with her parents, who worked in the theater and subsisted through the long Siberian winters on a diet of cabbage and carrots. Early on, it becomes clear to Pantaeva that she wants more, and she soon embarks on an arduous journey--narrated here as a comedy of errors--from a local fashion house to Moscow's Gorky studios, a kind of Soviet Disney Co. (at one point, she even meets up with the Dalai Lama). Pantaeva finally arrives, penniless, in Paris with dreams of modeling for a famous couturier and manages to catch the eye of Karl Lagerfeld, but not before hearing most of the fashion cognoscenti deride her ""exotic"" beauty. That was the early '90s, however, when waifs and grunge were the order of the day. By the final chapter, tastes have changed, and an ethnic chic has swept Pantaeva onto the runways, as she marries her soulmate in New York in the wake of the collapse of the oppressive government that drove her away. (Sept.) FYI: In 1995, Pantaeva was the subject of a New Yorker profile by novelist Jay McInerney.