In Fado, Stasiuk puts the blasted landscape of Nine ("every lavatory lady used to tell stories Scheherazade wouldn't dream of when she finally hit the sack") and the horrors of Darwinian survival in the mountains behind him. "This lyric of loss, this Slavic On the Road," he describes the book, footnotes his novels, giving them the analytic hinge he refuses in his fiction. In Fado, he outlines why the East is a stranger in the West and still a threat to it; how the long history of the twentieth century uprooted the East; in what ways capitalism puts so many lives in the East at risk. Fado also follows his search—the legacy of the road—for a new life, his "Europeanness" questioned from either side, not only by the West but also by Gypsies, who Stasiuk is drawn to because their "ahistorical presence" defies understanding by the modern world.