There is a tempting urge to begin: "This is a book about mountain-climbing, but it's not about mountain-climbing." That would help reassure some non-hobbyists (like me), but in fact, this is a book that's not "about" mountain-climbing that happens to be very about mountain-climbing.I'll try to explain. Salter takes us into the world of someone we might call an anti-hero, if he ever let us get close enough to him to judge him with finality. We're thrown deeply inside his mind, body, and spirit, the higher he climbs. There's a linear relationship between his closeness to death and his distance from earth vs. our connection to his psychology. It's as if he only wants to light up when he's godlike. On descent, our graph line connection to him shoots abruptly downward. Back on earth, he's this hollow shell that's accented beautifully by Salter's Hemingway/Cormac McCarthy-esque sparse prose. He sleeps with women. He drinks. He moves around. He waits…In my mind, Salter steps nimbly around all the mistakes he could be making in this narrative strategy. For one thing, the mountaineering passages are absolutely necessary. Terminology surfaces, sans the Moby Dick-esque discourses on the subject or the Philip Roth chest-thumping on author research (I'm still bitter about reading and living through that whole 'gloving industry' thing). Sure, mountain-climbing is a perfect metaphorical apparatus but he fleshes it out as the real thing inside the plot that it is.Even if you enter this book with zero interest in the topic, you'll be edified by commonalities that all time-consuming, manic hobbies have. Whatever you use for escapism, Salter's guy is just maxing out in the same categories of escapism, selfishness, oneupmanship, etc.Salter also has this completely unique way of suddenly delving into characters you might assume would just be hollow husks: specifically, the women that get slept with and left. It's this almost apologetic turning of the POV from the anti-hero to the woman scorned, and it reads so naturally, for a reason I can't quite put my finger on. Is it because our antihero is such an unsubstantial husk on flat ground that he can't bear to have us stay with him for more than a brief chapter or two?I would five-star recommend to anyone who appreciates literary form as much as they do plot and "likable characters." If the latter are your meat and potatoes and nice form is just a side-dish, you will tend to agree with the 3-star reviewers.
I am a collector of mountaineering nonfiction and am writing several nonfiction narrative essays about search and rescue missions. I originally began reading this novel as a model for approaching mountaineering exposition and imagery. There were several passages that I found helpful in this regard. For example, I enjoyed Salter's characterization in this passage, "a breed of aimless wanderers...working as mason's helpers, carpenters, parking cars. They somehow keep a certain dignity, they are surprisingly unashamed. It's one thing to know their faces will become lined, their plain talk stupid, that they will be crushed in the end by those who stayed in school, bought land, practiced law. Still they have an infuriating power, that of condemned men."My favorite passage in the whole book is Salter's description of the Alps, "The Alps are new mountains, forced up from the crust of the earth, folded and refolded in comparatively recent times, four or five epochs ago. Mont Blanc itself is older. It is a block mountain , formed by a vast cleaving before even the time of the dinosaurs and drowned in seas that covered Europe after they disappeared. This ancient granite rose again when the Alps were born, higher than all that surrounded and clung to it, the highest point in Europe. Adjoining is an army of pyramids and pinnacles, the aiguilles, which have drawn climbers— the English to begin with and then others— for more than a hundred years. At first sight they seem to be numberless. They lie in ranks and rough arcs to the south and east, some of the largest, like the Grandes Jorasses, almost hidden by those that were closer. The north faces are the coldest and usually the most difficult. They receive less sun, sometimes only an hour or two a day, and are often covered in snow throughout the year. The winters are cold, the summers brief and often cloudy. The people are mountain people, hard and self-reliant— for years the Chamonix guides accepted in their ranks only those born in the valley. At the same time new roads opened the town to the world. In July and August huge crowds arrive. The restaurants, hotels, even the mountains themselves are filled. In September, as if by decree, everyone vanishes and there remains nothing but the blue letters that spell CARLTON shining mournfully at night above empty streets."
What do You think about Solo Faces (1988)?
Rand is young, aimless, and not interested or able to hold down a job or a meaningful relationship with women. His one true passion is climbing, and he's fearless and very good at it. He travels to France to conquer some of the most treacherous and difficult mountains in the world, and he stays there for months among some mountaineering friends and acquaintances.I liked the premise and I enjoyed all of the climbing scenes and descriptions. It is a brutal and very dangerous sport, and one must literally have no fear. The writing was pretty good, Rand was not really a guy I cared much for but I think that was the point. However he was brave and sometimes heroic when he needed to be. Near the end, when he returns to the US and reunites with a friend, it seems as though he was borderline crazy and I wasn't a fan of how that played out. It didn't seem realistic and it didn't seem to fit with the rest of the story.This was a quick read, fairly enjoyable, but there was such a disconnect with the main character it was hard to care too much.
—Jennifer
It should be clear, to anyone who checks the books I've read this past year, that James Salter has gotten into me, his characters, his melancholy. This book is no different, a potent, poignant example of his style and storytelling, which strikes me as being un-american, his stories tend to be tight and small, books that seem unambitious but endure. At least in my memory.It falls a little way short of Light Years, which is near perfect in execution, because it has no compelling female characters, and little attempt at anything beyond defeat in tone and also short of The Hunters whose misery unsettled me thoroughly, as well as containing the most glorious descriptions of flight I've read. The world has lost one of its greatest writers of sentences with James Salter's passing, but I suspect that he will still be discovered by readers well into the future.
—Rory Macpherson
OK, so I gave it two stars, but I still read it to the end. It's a story about a climber who at times directs but mostly follows his way through adventures in the mountains and with women. It moves along well in part because the climbs are suspenseful -- how could getting injured 1,000 feet up a rock face not be? -- and because the hero, Rand, is unpredictable. He lives a completely selfish life, not allowing even the woman he loves any hint of commitment. He seduces, conquers, leaves or is left, with no emotion, or at least none the author cares to give us. He blows his best chance at love, blows off the idea of a normal job, and suffers only enough from it that he loses the courage to climb and not enough to actually try to change himself. He is not a likable or particularly interesting character. A review on the back claims Salter's writing "exemplifies the purity it describes." The style does stand out, but pure isn't the first word that comes to my mind, unless somehow the short sentences reflect Rand's simple mind. The book is peppered with anecdotes (the stories of a man who picks him up hitchhiking, for example) that lead nowhere and seem to have no role in carrying plot or providing meaning, unless the point is the simple randomness of life. For all that happens in the short years covered in the book, there seems little in the way of narrative. At least there's nothing in the way of personal growth for Rand.I'm open to the argument that writing meaningfully about climbing and mountaineering is hard -- the unique experiences of climbing could be more corporal than cerebral -- and this book does little to counter that.
—stefan
