BEST BOOKS ON... MOUNTAINS
FROM every window of the Alpine village apartment in which I am staying, you can see mountain tops and densely wooded slopes. We are in an emerald valley encircled by peaks — my favourite type of view.
As a toddler I explored the Cairngorms from my father’s back, wedged inside an early baby carrier, or possibly just a framed backpack.
From him, a keen mountaineer until family life took precedence, my brothers and I inherited a love for high places, plus a solemn respect for their unpredictability.
When my children look askance at someone setting off up a hill in double-denim, I do feel something useful has been passed on.
Maria von Trapp felt more comfortable communing with God yodelling atop a summit. ‘I will lift mine eyes up to the hills whence cometh my help,’ the Bible’s Psalm 121 says. And even in secular 20th and 21st-century fiction, the idea of mountains offering spiritual and physical succour persists.
Charles Frazier’s 1997 literary blockbuster Cold Mountain begins near the end of the American Civil War, with its hero, Inman, lying in a Confederate hospital, imagining the contours of his North Carolina homeland: ‘...that healing realm, Cold Mountain nevertheless soared in his mind as a place where all his scattered forces might gather’.
In Italian Paolo Cognetti’s prizewinning coming-of-age novel, The Eight Mountains, published to acclaim in English this year, its narrator Pietro recalls how his distant, forbidding father, would become ‘a different man . . . cheerful and talkative, the complete opposite of the father I was used to in the city’ during summer holidays exploring his beloved Italian Alps.
The characters of Thomas Mann’s slyly funny 20th-century classic The Magic Mountain have literally come to the mountains seeking a cure; its setting is a Swiss sanatorium. Its protagonist, Hans, comes to visit a tubercular cousin, but ends up staying seven years, possibly seduced by the restful environment.
There will be no rest for my family this week, or at least until we’ve had a proper hike.