Reaching New Heights
Reviews
By Sam Carter
When accepting an award in 1999 for his novel The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolaño articulated his understanding of what great writing requires. Rarely one to refrain from making such pronouncements, the Chilean writer contended that one quality was both indispensable and immutable: “the ability to peer into the darkness, to leap into the void, to know that literature is basically a dangerous undertaking. The ability to sprint along the edge of the precipice: to one side the bottomless abyss and to the other the faces you love.” What resounds in this claim is the belief that any rewarding literary experience is only attainable through risk.
The Argentine writer and editor Sebastián Martínez Daniell’s Two Sherpas (Charco Press), which first appeared in Spanish in 2018 and which Jennifer Croft has now translated into English, heeds Bolaño’s call precisely by situating its narrative at the very edge of an abyss. High up in the Himalayas, an Englishman lies at the bottom of a crack in the ice. Yet the risk lies not so much within that space as it does with the novel’s structure, which is split into short sections that are rarely more than a page long. Each of these sections orbits the moment the two sherpas of the title peer over the edge of the crevasse to see the motionless body of the man they were guiding ten meters below. Despite these constraints, Martínez Daniell skillfully traverses the mountain’s terrain and even crosses continents in a sweeping meditation on whose risks are immediately recognized and whose efforts are regularly rendered invisible.
The novel tracks how the sherpas, who remain unnamed, took radically different paths to this decisive moment. The older sherpa, as he is referred to, earns that distinction only by comparison. He first came to Nepal in his late twenties, only setting foot on Everest at age thirty-three; in four attempts, he’s never summited the mountain. Perhaps because he is a relative newcomer, the winds shaping the physical and psychological conditions on the mountain affect him more than they do his counterpart. This younger sherpa, who is still in his teens and has summited Everest twice, hails from the region but longs to leave, mulling over possibilities that range from naval engineering to diplomacy. Yet he has also spent almost eight months rehearsing for a brief role in a small-scale production of Julius Caesar, and several of the novel’s sections feature musings on the play’s construction. Because Shakespeare’s own words are not inserted, Julius Caesar is less an interlocutor than a source of momentum—a surface into which one might plunge an ice axe in order to propel oneself upward.
As it distorts time by dilating the narrative of the sherpas’ indecision, the novel also engages in the disorientation of the senses that can occur at altitude. The breaking of a silence between the two sherpas, as one repeated line puts it, is possible only “if the deafening noise of the wind ravelling over the ridges of the Himalayas can be considered silence.” Similar hallucinatory phenomena shape many moments on the mountain. At one point, as the young sherpa waits, his inactivity ushers him “into a phantasmagoric zone. A place that is not the resinous chaos of the present, but also not the fossil past. A site that has no form. It’s hard to give it a name. The magmatic, perhaps.” The novel itself creates just such a space of suspension, guiding us through the sherpas’ personal history—their mistreatment by mountaineers, the tragedies they’ve suffered, and the injustices inflicted by the Nepalese government—while never claiming to speak for them or about their current conditions.
However, the novel powerfully distills the many asymmetries that determine how mountains are scaled. For the sherpas, their many responsibilities mean that little distinguishes ascending from descending. The foreign climbers who reach the summit, on the other hand, “believe that they have outperformed the species and, at least for an instant, they see themselves as demigods. They celebrate, they hug, they take pictures (because they always take pictures, always relapse into narcissism, always take phenomenology down to the level of the souvenir.)” As it supercharges the foreign mountaineers’ self-involvement and intoxication, the thin mountain air makes inequality visible. And accompanying this sharp critique is an attempt to understand the older sherpa’s feelings. He adamantly resists any effort to frame his interactions with tourists as beneficial. “They see us as mules, beings with bone structures suited to lugging great weights,” he explains. “They see it as perfectly logical for Sherpas to summit. They ought to think of us as Titans, deities with powers unattainable by mere mortals.” Ultimately, the tourism that has altered life on the mountain, as Martínez Daniell frequently points out, is not so different from those attempts to “conquer nature” that inspired the first summits. Nor is it easily distinguishable from British colonialism, the legacy of which can still be felt in Nepal.
Indeed, it is no accident that it is an Englishman who lies at the bottom of a crack in the ice as the sherpas look on without doing anything. The Englishman, as the old sherpa remarks, tried to resist and regain his balance when he should have just let the fall happen. His fatal choice combines the imperial arrogance and ignorance that surfaces elsewhere in the novel, particularly in its recollection of the reception accorded the famous 1953 summit by Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary. The novel recounts, for instance, a denigrating 1964 appearance on the television show “To Tell the Truth” in which Norgay was accompanied by two persons of Asian descent and subjected to questions from panelists attempting to determine which of the three was the real sherpa. On another occasion, Norgay offers a compelling response to indignity. When asked how he felt when Hillary and others were knighted while he was not, he poses a question in return: “Would a knighthood give me wings?” This rejoinder is perhaps unsurprising coming from someone who has scaled such great heights given that it quickly puts everything into perspective—simultaneously acknowledging the trouble with the award and diminishing it.
As it effortlessly covers so much ground, Two Sherpas produces what its author has termed a slight “Aleph” effect. Here, Martínez Daniell refers to the Jorge Luis Borges story in which everything everywhere can be seen in an object sitting in the basement of a home in Buenos Aires. Borges’ influence can certainly be felt in this novel. But, in its scope, ambition, and precision, it might more closely resemble Benjamín Labatut’s recent When They Cease to Understand the World, a heady mix of fiction and nonfiction that roams across both the centuries and the sciences. Two Sherpas similarly encourages us to glimpse the connections between otherwise seemingly unrelated moments as it erodes, with the regular force of crampons crunching into the snow, expectations about whose acts ultimately count as heroic.
Sam Carter is a writer whose work has appeared online at Public Books, Music & Literature, Real Life, Full Stop, and Asymptote, among other publications.
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