It’s almost the holidays and therefore the opportunity to have a little time to read on the train, in a shelter, or even at the beach. The Montagnes Magazine editorial team has selected several books that will accompany your summer.
Saskia
Reviewed by Hervé Bodeau
Saskia, Guillaume Desmurs, Paulsen Editions, Guérin collection, 192 pages, €21.
Welcome to Chamonix. The totemic valley, an obsessive isolation with its established families passing on the guide medal from generation to generation, its indestructible legends. She fascinates and just as quickly rejects those who are out of place. In Guillaume Desmurs’ new novel, Alex is one of them. A young aspiring guide, he wants to break the codes of mountaineering and has succumbed to the gaze of Saskia, from Chamonix, daughter of the great figure of the valley. He will face the impossibility of upsetting the established order, especially when a hidden truth could torpedo the great history of mountaineering. Over three eras, from 1999 to 2039, the high-tension story will unfold between love story, initiatory novel, dystopia. An ambition not so common in mountain fiction.
The writing, in the first person, like the story and the relationships between the characters, is finely chiseled and raw. The style is at the service of its subject. It awakens and scratches like the grain of granite whose slabs and cracks we persist in climbing in search of liberation. And throughout the pages, Guillaume Desmurs does not let go.
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Mont-Blanc – Origins
Reviewed by Hervé Bodeau
Mont-Blanc – Origins, Jérôme Obiols, SpotÉditions, 156 pages, €65.
Here is a beautiful book of mountain photos in the form of a high-altitude route to discover the Mont-Blanc massif. An elegant black and white business card, a tribute to the great names in mountain photography. Jérôme Obiols is betting that this sobriety, combined with his eye and large formats, is capable of revealing the high places. Even in 2024. And as the summits and ridges pass, he is largely right. Ice, snow, minerality emerge, most of the time, from cloudy swirls. In Savoyard dialect, as Dominique Potard specifies in his preface, we say “nioles” to designate these mists and clouds. They dress the mountains like ephemeral fabrics to better reveal them. From one image to another, depending on the seasons, the power and fragility of the high mountains are inscribed on the prints. The complexity of the lines comes to light, far from the postcard, closer to the experience of those who frequent these terrains. The cherry on the cake is that the author’s texts punctuate the images with historical reminders of the great climbs and conquests in the massif. All you have to do is imagine yourself up there.
Himalaya Business
Chronicled by Thomas Vennin
Himalaya Business, François Carrel, Paulsen-Guérin Editions, 160 pages, €22.
“What have we done with the 8,000?” is the subtitle of this investigation, which traces the history of commercial expeditions in the Himalayas to try to understand how the Nepalese regained control of their mountains and transformed the market for the 8,000 into an ultra-lucrative industry.
Starting from the Nimsdai case – his record on the fourteen 8,000s at the winter at K2 –, he sheds light on the shift of the fourteen 8,000s, Everest in the lead, into an unbridled liberalism where only turnover counts. The author met him several times; he also spoke with the specialist guide from Nepal Paulo Grobel, the mountaineer Sophie Lavaud, a privileged spectator of this development, and the mountain rescue expert Blaise Agresti.
Overcrowding, accumulation of waste and nuisances linked to the omnipresence of the helicopter, safety of Sherpas and their clients… so many questions at the heart of this saving book, which clarifies in passing the different Nepalese structures and the related balance of power .
A History of Mountain Huts
Chronicled by Mathias Virilli
A history of mountain refuges, Hervé Bodeau, Éditions Glénat, 160 pages, €25.95.
After mountaineering, mountain rescue, skiing, winter sports resorts and Everest, Glénat editions offer us a new intimate story, this time written by Hervé Bodeau, with mountain huts as the subject. Through around sixty stories, the author takes us to this hospitable elsewhere that has allowed the mountains to shelter people for over 1,000 years.
From the “first nights” to the ongoing reflections on the future of these “high places”, it is a sensitive journey that honors the diversity of these unique buildings, without obscuring either its passing inhabitants or its issues, whether architectural, social or climatic. We will appreciate the freedom of tone of the work, interspersed with personal anecdotes and sketches by Hervé, himself a literary columnist in our columns. A history of mountain huts is pecked more than it is devoured, because each glance at the refuges is enjoyed like a new adventure.
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Cloud Inventory
Reviewed by Damien Fahnauer
The Inventory of Clouds, Franco Faggiani, Paulsen editions, 320 pages, €22
In 1915, the Great War is still close and threatening, but the echo of its bombs resonates little in the steep and wild valleys of Val Maira, in the south of Piedmont. Women often live alone, trying to survive the harsh winters while waiting for the return of the men who have left for the front. Giacomo, an invalid, is one of those who stay. The Cloud Inventory follows the initiatory wandering of this young misfit hero, returning to his native village of Prazzo.
After years of monastic study, rising above his mountains through books, Giacomo is initiated by his grandfather into the profession of Cavie : an arduous task, like the mountains he will survey, in search of hard-working and broken women led to expose themselves by shedding their hair, destined to make wigs. But the quest is twofold for Giacomo: a precious braid and a profound testimony of the place, to better root himself and understand a territory populated by mountain beings that he still barely knows. Giacomo seeks his path and his voice by weaving his own story, both contemplative and intimate.
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And you will pass like crazy winds
Chronicled by Hervé Bodeau
And you will pass like crazy winds, Clara Arnaud, Éditions Actes Sud, 274 pages, €22.50.
After the very beautiful novel by Valentine Goby, L’Ile Haute, published in 2022, Actes Sud published, last fall, another work which immerses us in the heart of the mountain territory, but not only… It is the novel by the travel writer Clara Arnaud, And you will pass like crazy winds. We are in the Pyrenees and in New York, yesterday and today. At the heart of this journey, the figure of the bear. It is the bear cub that Jules captures, trains and takes with him to America to exhibit it and make his fortune, at the turn of the 1900s. It is also, today, in parallel, the female who threatens the sheep from Gaspard’s summer pasture and on whose trail is Alma, a young ethologist, responsible for studying the behavior of bears. For three seasons, we will be up there, as close as possible to nature, to animals, to the men and women who live and at the same time elsewhere in the world. It is the strength of Clara Arnaud’s writing, both precise and poetic, to immerse us in these different space-times. In fact, regardless of the era, it is the same story that the author tells, that of the relationship of men to their environment, to wild spaces and to the other living beings that exist there. This is obviously the one that questions us today.
