Ed Viesturs at Powell's Books

On Friday the 29^th, my room-mate and I went to the downtown Powell's to hear mountain-climber Ed Viesturs speak and sign copies of his book, “No Shortcuts to the Top.” Viesturs was the first American to climb all fourteen of the world’s 8,000 meter peaks, and incredibly, he did it without using supplemental oxygen. I enjoyed the book and I was excited to see Viesturs in person.

“No Shortcuts” is a solid piece of mountaineering writing. Written with David Roberts, it details Viestur’s life and career as a climber and family man. In no-nonsense terms, Viesturs talks about his climbing philosophies and successes, offering insights into the world of high-altitude mountaineering and tragedies such as the 1996 Everest disaster. The writing is straight-forward and clear, gripping and suspenseful in many places and funny in others, though suffering slightly from a lack of narrative beauty that should, in my opinion, suffuse a book written about adventures in a region itself suffused with beauty.

In person, Viesturs is honest and funny, with a confident type-A personality. He portrays himself as a risk manager, rather than a risk-taker, and he repeatedly fell back on his mantra that “Getting to the top is optional. Getting down is mandatory.” A gorgeous slide show accompanied the tale of his last 8,000 meter bid for the summit of Annapurna, a mountain that claims the lives of 1 of every 2 climbers who attempt its steep slopes. Viesturs and his partner waited for days at base camp for the weather to clear and for the perfect climbing conditions to prevail. “Listen to the mountain,” Viesturs said; the mountain chooses when the time to climb is right. It’s hard to argue with that, even when he speaks directly about the mistakes, often fatal, that his fellow climbers and friends have made over the years.

The book is focused and lean: the summit climbs, the lives and sometimes deaths of other climbers, and the behind-the-scenes planning are just what I want in outdoor literature - detailed and suspenseful, well-plotted and transporting. However, Viesturs didn’t speak or write about several pertinent issues I wanted to know more about, and his personality seemed at times to overcome any interest he had in speaking about them. For example, his summit bids come across as half-way arrogant when little attention is paid to the spiritual and personal growth offered by such a physical test of the mind and body. I’m interested in what Viesturs gained from his experiences, and I wasn’t satisfied with the answer that he set himself a goal and simply pursued it. Other writers, Jon Krakauer especially, personalized their climbing accounts and gave their stories a deeper, more nuanced, and ultimately more human perspective.

That perspective also seemed lacking in Viesturs’ responses to audience questions about the commercialization of Everest, and by extension, of Nepalese culture. He seemed dismissive of such concerns by answering “The mountain [Everest] is commercialized,” and that nothing will change that. Perhaps, but I’d like to hear more about his views on the erosion of traditional ways of life and the heavy environmental impact of commercial climbing.

Yet, these might be my own personal reactions to a man who is goal-driven and highly successful at getting what he wants. There’s nothing wrong in that, and I have to remind myself that Viesturs was on a promotional tour. He controlled the crowd well, allowed many questions, answered them efficiently, and signed quickly. As a bookstore employee who often assists with author events, I can say that I wish more authors were like that. As an avid hiker and backpacker who is very interested in the topic, I wish I could say that Viesturs had been more open and informative at his signing. That’s not to say he wasn’t inspirational or entertaining; my room-mate hadn’t read the book yet and was excited to do so, partly in order to compare the necessarily brief spoken anecdotes to the more developed written stories.

In his presentation, Viesturs said that it wasn’t necessary for every individual on Everest in 1996 to write their account; every eyewitness, of course, tells a different story, and revisiting the tragedy isn’t always necessary or healthy. But it’s that human yearning to know, to listen, and to learn that drives people to write and tell stories, to read books, and to show up to author signings. The goal, so to speak, is optional; getting something from the attempt is mandatory. Viesturs has accomplished an amazing mountaineering feat, and his book, despite some flaws, will become a classic of mountaineering literature.

My Name is Red, by Orhan Pamuk

“My Name is Red” is many things at once: a love story, a murder mystery, a historical tale with parallels to modern times. In 1591, Black returns to Istanbul after twelve years abroad. The woman he loves, Shekure, is raising her two children alone after her husband failed to return from a military campaign. Charged by the Sultan to assemble an illuminated book using techniques borrowed from the Europeans, Black’s beloved Uncle has secretly assembled the finest group of miniaturists in the city. When one of them is murdered, love, art, philosophy and religion interplay in a tightly structured and complex novel of ideas, beliefs, and detective work.

Each chapter is devoted to the first-person point of view of a single character, including the murdered miniaturist and his murderer, other miniaturists, Black and Shekure, and the neighborhood match-maker; even the subjects of sketches used by a storyteller in a coffee shop get their say. This device allows Pamuk to tell the tale from many angles and to develop nuanced and distinctive characters. Black, for instance, has pined for Shekure for so long that his unrequited love propels and subsumes all his thoughts and actions:

“Maybe you’ve understood by now that for men like myself, that is, melancholy men for whom love, agony, happiness and misery are just excuses for maintaining eternal loneliness, life offers neither great joy nor great sadness.”

Black may be considered the primary character, but as in any good work of literature, plot and conflict do not revolve around a sole protagonist. The miniaturists themselves are central to the discussions of art and the reactions of their religious contemporaries; “My Name is Red” is thus, first and foremost, a political novel disguised as a historical mystery with art at center stage:

“An artist’s skill depends on carefully attending to the beauty of the present moment, taking everything down to the minutest detail seriously while, at the same time, stepping back from the world, which takes itself too seriously, and as if looking into a mirror, allowing for the distance and eloquence of a jest.”

The Koran forbids depicting Allah, and the miniaturists in “My Name is Red” are persecuted by fundamentalists who belief their illustrations are an affront to their faith. Pamuk's novels obliquely comment on current affairs, and the issues he writes about in “My Name is Red” are still contentious today. It isn’t any wonder that Pamuk's life has been threatened or that the Turkish government recently arrested a group of men plotting to kill him.

Despite the risk of didacticism in the novel and the threat of persecution in real life, Pamuk still pulls off a great story within a story. Black's courtship of Shekure isn't as radiant as Ka's courtship of Ipek in "Snow," and the philosophical discussions and historical analysis of Islamic art are sometimes repetitive and tend to slow the action, but in the end, “My Name is Red” successfully integrates multiple strands of storytelling into an illuminating and colorfully woven tapestry of art, history, and the human condition. In Pamuk's world, the past and the present are eerily similar - and that's both comforting and sad at the same time.

Twentieth-Century German Poetry, by Michael Hofmann (ed).

I’m reading this now, and want to review it even before I’ve finished it. Can you ever really finish an anthology of poetry, anyway?

Michael Hofmann has selected a wide and diverse pool of poets from the last century of German verse. Included are many poets known, at least by name, to English-speaking audiences: Rilke, Brecht, Grass. But the bulk of this almost 500-page book consists of the varied and diverse poetry written by poets unknown in this country, and their work, which spans a century of style and form, history and theme, is astoundingly familiar, fresh, and vital. You can flip through these pages at will and find gems such as this short poem by Inge Müller:

“You promised me you would walk with me”

You promised me you would walk with me
In the sun
And by the river, where the trees
Are still in leaf
…
The trees have been in leaf
Four times since then
Days off are as rare
As sun in late fall—
Leaves rustle
On our desks.

Müller’s economy and imagery call to mind Chinese poetry, and the subject is universal and heartfelt. A few pages later, you can find concrete poems, poems about war and guilt, protest poems, experimental poems, poems about exile and loss, about love and travel, a poem adapted from Joseph Conrad (Heiner Müller), and everywhere, poetry and lines that have the power to slay:

“Wenn sie weint, sieht sie aus wie neunzhen.”
(When she weeps she looks nineteen.)
- Hans Magnus Enzenberger, At Thirty-three

“So geht das all diese Jahre,
Strukturen, Fröste, Eulenflug, Kriege im September.”
(This is how it is every year, structures,
frosts, owl flight, wars in September.)
- Jürgen Becker, Autumn Story

I’ve chosen to include the original German in these few examples because the original is shown side by side with the translation. This is a powerful tool towards understanding the language and the translation itself, and it deepens the reader’s understanding of the poet’s intentions. It is particularly helpful in Ernst Jandl’s transliteration of Wordsworth, where the German line read aloud – “mai hart lieb zapfen eibe hold / er renn bohr in sees kai” – becomes the English line “My heart leaps up when I behold / A rainbow in the sky.” Without the literal translation of the German, a German monoglot would only read “may hard dear cone yew fair” without understanding the poetic device or the poem’s meaning.

This collection is a distillation of a century of verse and Hoffman makes no claim that it is complete; indeed, he refuses to apologize for whatever faults the anthology may have. Scholars may choose to pick apart this anthology and seek weakness; I, instead, will return to it again and again for inspiration and strength.

Earliest Recording of "Howl" Discovered in Portland

The Oregonian recently reported the discovery of an audio recording of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" that predates the famous "first" reading in Berkeley on March 18th, 1956. Howl, of course, is the seminal Beat poem and the subject of an obscenity trial when it was published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights Books in 1956. The clear, strong recording was found by John Suiter, a professor at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, while he was doing biographical research on Reed alumnus and Beat poet Gary Snyder. Snyder and Ginsberg were hitchiking through the northwest and participated in poetry readings at the college in mid-February, 1956.

While this does nothing to diminish the legendary Berkeley reading and it's historical significance, it certainly cements Portland's place in Beat history. After all, Portland features in "On the Road," and many of the Beats - Kerouac, Snyder, Ginsberg and Phillip Whalen among them - passed through on their rucksack travels along the winding roads and trails of the Pacific northwest. It also adds a chapter to Oregon's already rich literary history, and provides a fascinating opportunity for scholars and fans to study the development of Ginsberg's poem and writing practices.

Out Stealing Horses, by Per Petterson

The best novel of 2007.

How we translate our past actions and experiences is at least as important as those actions and experiences themselves. Out Stealing Horses, itself superbly translated from the Norwegian, follows the arc of Trond Sander's life as he reflects during a quiet retirement on the violent summer that marked his coming of age. Forced to confront a long-avoided past, he finally deliberates on the adolescent loss, aching beauty, and harrowing grief that underpinned his adulthood. With finely drawn characters, a stark natural setting, and haunting minimalist prose, this quiet, powerful, and spare novel of acceptance is a meditative tale for all.

Well, that's what I initially wrote for my bookstore's website. On a deadline, with a word limit. Orwell would be ashamed. Here's a shelf-talker I wrote for the paperback release, something a little more personal and closer to the truth of my experience:

"I’ve recommended this book more than any other in the last year. It’s achingly personal and wonderfully encompassing, and almost effortlessly shadows and shares my thoughts. Petterson quietly drew me into Trond’s childhood, an innocence that was too quickly shattered and thrust into adulthood, and the unconfronted pain that took a lifetime to understand and accept. This story feels like a quiet talk with trusted friend, someone who knows all your secrets and weaknesses and who is always ready with a steady hand, even when you don’t know you need it. The final line, coming at the end of a such a powerful, uplifting and beautiful tale, reads like poetry and feels like the silence at the end of symphony, in that moment between the last fading sound and the first clap of realization that a masterpiece has just been performed."

Now I don't sound like a washed-up book critic with a thesaurus and a style sheet of recommended "review words."