Consolations of the Forest by Sylvain Tesson – review

A philosophical and companionable account of Sylvain Tesson's six-months living as a hermit in a cabin in Siberia
Shoreline of Lake Baikal
Sylvain Tesson lived on the shore of Lake Baikal … ‘Better to live joyfully in a wilderness clearing than languish in a city.' Photograph: Ralph White/Corbis

Christ spent only 40 days in the wilderness. The French writer and adventurer Sylvain Tesson lasted six months. Unlike Christ, he wasn't fasting: plentiful supplies of vodka, cigars and Tabasco saw him through. He wasn't tempted by the devil, either: not once in the diary entries that comprise this book (winner of the 2011 Prix Médicis for non-fiction) does he seriously consider packing in and returning to civilisation. For the most part, solitude suits him just fine. "Better to live joyfully in a wilderness clearing than languish in a city."

The place of his retreat is a log cabin on the shores of Lake Baikal in Siberia. Where Soviet dissidents were once sent in exile, he goes to by choice, enduring temperatures of -30C. His only arms are a signal flare and dagger. His only source of heat is a cast-iron stove. And after his computer and satellite phone conk out, his only way of making contact with the world is to put on his snowshoes and walk – and the nearest village lies 75 miles away.

Why do it? To fulfil a seven-year-old dream of going to ground in a forest. To surround himself in silence. To escape ugliness, traffic and the telephone. To catch up on his reading. To see if immobility can bring the peace that travel used to. To sample an existence reduced to bare essentials. To become a hermit and find out whether he has an inner life.

Tesson believes hermits are the true radicals of our age. To retreat is to reject government bureaucracy and consumerism. Whereas those who dynamite the citadel need the citadel, the recluse simply opts out: "A repast of grilled fish and blueberries gathered in the forest is more anti-statist than a protest demonstration bristling with black flags." Yes, the hermit may be slow and woolly-minded but he "gains in poetry what is lost in agility".

Though he adopts the role of anchorite-sage and refusenik, Tesson's retreat is strikingly populous. "The hermit faces this question," he writes: "Can one stand living with oneself?" It's a question he's spared, thanks to constant interaction with others. A mere four days into his stay, in bleak mid-February, a pack of four-wheel drives shatter the silence, pitching up on the beach by his cabin – a bunch of Putin hierarchs from Irkutsk, it turns out. So it goes on. Barely a week passes without some hunter, fisherman or canoeist dropping in, or without Tesson heading off to visit a neighbour five hours away. Every such occasion means getting drunk. Not that he doesn't get drunk on his own – "It's at the fifth glass of vodka that resisting the next one becomes difficult" – but in company it's a solemn ritual.

In the periods when Tesson is alone, he strives for a life of pure sensation – lying in a hammock, listening to the wind, feeling the snow in his face, watching aerial displays of ducks and geese. He compares his existence with that of animals – and questions whether animals are as devoid of consciousness as philosophers claim: "What do we know about the thoughts of a bear? … Why shouldn't butterflies in the noonday sun find some aesthetic feeling in their choreography?" In his mind, nature isn't red in tooth and claw, but a shining moral example. When we're faced with a dilemma, he suggests, rather than ask how one of our heroes would act, we should ask what a horse or an oyster would do.

Forced to live in his head and record his thoughts daily, Tesson buzzes with ideas, some brilliant, some flaky. His journal is a mix of philosophising and nature worship, wrapped up in aperçus. "Solitude is a country inhabited by the remembrance of others." "Happiness is an obstacle to serenity." "Friendship doesn't survive anything, not even togetherness." "Aestheticism is a form of reactionary deviance." "If nature thinks, landscapes express the ideas."

Where does his love of aphorisms come from, he asks himself? Perhaps it's inscribed in his name – Tesson, a shard or fragment. His prose sometimes strains too hard ("Cabins are the votive lights hung on the roof of the night") but his saving grace is that he knows it. "The rhinoceros moon that with its horn wounds the night the colour of Africa," he writes, then dismisses the pretentiousness of the metaphor: the moon couldn't give a damn about "such sophomoric pseudo-aphorisms".

His favourite trope is the paradox, and his six months in Siberia are full of contradiction. He celebrates the joys of doing nothing, but skates, canoes, climbs the 6,000ft peaks behind his cabin, bivouacs on a cliff-ledge and walks 81 miles over three days pulling a sledge. He condemns hunting, and won't countenance using a gun, but sees no harm in catching fish. He extols the virtues of going back to nature but knows "the masses, taking to the woods, would bring along the evils they'd hoped to flee". He approves of wordlessness – the less you talk, the longer you live, one fisherman tells him – but gabbles away like mad in his diary.

At times he feels trapped, "stuck here alive in a wooden coffin". But reading the 70 books he has brought reaffirms him in his ideas and allows him to adopt different character roles. He's a beatnik, a Crusoe, a Zen philosopher, a frustrated Casanova and a Rousseau-esque child of nature rolled into one. He has Thoreau's Walden with him, of course. And if he doesn't cite Yeats, with his clay and wattle cabin by "The Lake Isle of Innisfree", that's forgivable: nine bean rows and a hive for honey bees make no sense in ice-locked Siberia. Among the traits of literary castaways, he notes, is "the need to constantly confirm the merits of the solitary life by insisting to oneself at every occasion on the beauty of such an existence". It's a habit he has himself.

Nothing much happens during his six months and that's part of the point. He learns to revere things he wouldn't normally notice: titmice, mosquitoes ("tiny flying syringes"), a fresh tint in the foliage of cedars, a glinting reflection off the snow. A fall through the ice and an encounter with a bear prove no big deal. The only life-threatening moment comes when he learns his girlfriend back home has dumped him. The pain is overwhelming. But he can't blow his brains out with a flare gun. And the two dogs he has just acquired – a loan from a neighbour along the lake – prove consoling. Never again will he express contempt for old people who wax sentimental about pets, he says: "I had no idea that fur soaks up tears so well."

A winter forest is like a dead city, and it's June before spring arrives. A month later he leaves, claiming to have been changed completely. In truth, there's little sign of that: the ideas he leaves with aren't much different from those with which he came. And even if he has changed, there's every chance the return to civilisation will change him back. Still, in Linda Coverdale's fluent translation, he comes across as the brainiest, daftest, sternest, funniest, most companionable hermit you'll ever meet.