Two very different people attempt to conquer a mountain peak. Are they friends or guide and customer? Who had the idea for the expedition? And, most importantly, what’s the purpose of climbing a mountain?
My family and I always had an uncomplicated relationship with mountaineering, a relationship that steered towards inevitability. Climbing a mountain is what you do if you want to feel alive, to connect with nature, to reflect on your life, and to find yourself, and that’s it. There’s no other day of doing it, no other possible explanation for the fatigue and the incredible danger. My grandmother, the wife of a man who would leave at three in the night with wooden skates on his back to go into the mountains, never understood it and tagged along until her old age gave her an excuse to stay behind, clear of the cold and the peril. She referred to our destination as “that accursed mountain”. She never said “I told you so” when my mother fell to her death during one of those expeditions.
That terrible beauty and inevitability reek through the pages of this book, and the mountain isn’t so much a third character, as it sometimes happens, but a distant and relentless mirror, reflecting and enlarging the life and temperament of the two main characters. A small masterpiece.
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