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eleganthedgehogs's review against another edition
Library now able to offer books by passing them outside in paper bag re covid. Still meeting in garden socially distanced.
All a bit taken aback to find in verse. All we’re glad to read and quite enjoyed. Some discussion about how translators make or break a book & how generally don’t tend to read much fiction if not written in English.
All a bit taken aback to find in verse. All we’re glad to read and quite enjoyed. Some discussion about how translators make or break a book & how generally don’t tend to read much fiction if not written in English.
jenni8fer's review against another edition
5.0
Whilst The Flying Mountain was longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker International Prize, I'm surprised it didn't make the shortlist. The author has extensive knowledge of Ireland and Asia as well as mountain climbing in Transhimalaya which I appreciate the details. I was on the edge of my seat reading the glacier climbing scenes.
The story follows two adult brothers who leave home on Horse Island off the southwestern coast of Ireland for Transhimalaya in eastern Tibet with the goal to climb an unnamed mountain in an unmarked territory on the map discovered by the older brother on his computer's screen saver. They enter China on a visa for an educational tour through the country on farming along with other foreign dignitaries. The two discretely deviate from the group to go to eastern Tibet close to the border of Nepal for the Transhimalayan mountain range. There they join a tribe of natives as they make their months' long journey to move their yaks and goats for summer grazing from one side of the region, where the tribe winters, to the base of the Flying Mountain, as the natives call the unnamed mountain the brothers mean to climb. During this journey, the younger brother who is the narrator will come to understand much about his strained relationship with his older brother and their childhood with their domineering father.
This is a story of family and love written in beautiful blank verse. I loved it!
The story follows two adult brothers who leave home on Horse Island off the southwestern coast of Ireland for Transhimalaya in eastern Tibet with the goal to climb an unnamed mountain in an unmarked territory on the map discovered by the older brother on his computer's screen saver. They enter China on a visa for an educational tour through the country on farming along with other foreign dignitaries. The two discretely deviate from the group to go to eastern Tibet close to the border of Nepal for the Transhimalayan mountain range. There they join a tribe of natives as they make their months' long journey to move their yaks and goats for summer grazing from one side of the region, where the tribe winters, to the base of the Flying Mountain, as the natives call the unnamed mountain the brothers mean to climb. During this journey, the younger brother who is the narrator will come to understand much about his strained relationship with his older brother and their childhood with their domineering father.
This is a story of family and love written in beautiful blank verse. I loved it!
grauspitz's review against another edition
DNF @ about 60% of the way through.
This book made me want to fall asleep, and the fact that it had such an effect on me kept me from picking it up and just powering through. I don’t care enough about the plot, or lack there of, to continue and the writing style, while beautiful at times, didn’t appeal to me enough to make me want to read more.
This book made me want to fall asleep, and the fact that it had such an effect on me kept me from picking it up and just powering through. I don’t care enough about the plot, or lack there of, to continue and the writing style, while beautiful at times, didn’t appeal to me enough to make me want to read more.
arirang's review against another edition
4.0
And I huddled in his arms,
six thousand, eight hundred and forty metres above the sea,
and stared through a thick flurry of flakes
at the plumes of ice above Phur-Ri,
at the dazzling peak of the Flying Mountain,
where I had carved
our names in the snow
with the handle of my ice-pick.
I was alive.
The final book from the MBI longlist, and perhaps the one where my feelings are most ambiguous. Ultimately I wouldn't see this as a winner, but it is hovering near my personal shortlist.
Christoph Ransmayr's 2006 novel Der fliegende Berg has been translated into English by Simon Pare as The Flying Mountain - a long-overdue and highly welcome translation given the flurry of translations into other languages (French, Italian, Croatian, Dutch, Polish, Slovenian, Serbian and Hungarian) that rapidly followed its publication.
One apparent barrier to translation is Ransmayr's use of broken - or his preferred term, flying - lines, although he sees this as prose rather than poetry, from his introduction:
Since most poets have abandoned metrical language and now, instead of verses, use free rhythms and floating lines arranged in stanzas, here and there a misunderstanding has arisen that any text consisting of floating lines, ie, lines of unequal length, is poetry. That is incorrect. A floating line – or better: a flying line – is free and does not belong to poets alone.
Although this also means the translation isn't constrained by any specific rhyme or metrical pattern, it still leaves the challenge of reproducing the cadence of the line-breaks as Pare explained in an interview with the MBI:
I died
six thousand, eight hundred and forty metres above sea level
on the fourth of May in the Year of the Horse.
My deathplace
lay at the foot of an ice-armoured needle of rock
in whose lee I had survived the night.
The air temperature at the time of my death
was minus 30 degrees Celsius
and I saw the moisture
of my final breath crystallize
and disperse like smoke into the light of dawn.
I felt no cold. I was in no pain.
The pulsing of the wound in my left hand
was strangely dulled.
Through the bottomless chasms at my feet
fists of cloud came drifting from the south-east.
The ridge leading from my shelter up and up
to the pyramidal peak
was lost in driving banners of ice,
but the sky above the highest heights
remained so deep a blue
that in it I thought I could make out the constellations
of Boötes, Serpens and Scorpio.
The German, for comparison:
Ich starb
6840 Meter über dem Meeresspiegel
am vierten Mai im Jahr des Pferdes.
Der Ort meines Todes
lag am Fuß einer eisgepanzerten Felsnadel,
in deren Windschatten ich die Nacht überlebt hatte.
Die Lufttemperatur meiner Todesstunde
betrug minus 30 Grad Celsius,
und ich sah, wie die Feuchtigkeit
meiner letzten Atemzüge kristallisierte
und als Rauch in der Morgendämmerung zerstob.
Ich fror nicht. Ich hatte keine Schmerzen.
Das Pochen der Wunde an meiner linken Hand
war seltsam taub.
Durch die bodenlosen Abgründe zu meinen Füßen
trieben Wolkenfäuste aus Südost.
Der Grat, der von meiner Zuflucht
weiter und weiter
bis zur Psyramide des Gipfels emporführte,
verlor sich in jagenden Eisfahnen,
aber der Himmel über den höchsten Höhen
blieb von einem so dunklen Blau,
daß ich darin Sternbilder zu erkennen glaubte:
den Bärenhüter, die Schlange, den Skorpion.
We soon learn that the two have been caught in a storm while climbing alone in the Himalayas on an unclimbed peak, Phur Ri, and that Pad actually survives his near-death experience, saved by Liam, only for Liam to die later on, swept away by an avalanche.
Their father was a fanatical Irish nationalist, a terrorist supporter (if not an active participant). His nationalism (when not in the form of plans for military campaigns against the Brits) takes two opposite yet consistent forms, a strong attachment to his locality and a proprietary interest in the Irish diaspora:
It was this Ireland
that so many emigrants' dreams
or sheer poverty had spun into an endless web
a cat's cradle spanning Australia and both Americas,
New Zealand and various South Pacific islands,
the shores of Indonesia and southern Africa,
that my father finally felt was grand enough,
big enough, to merit
the distinction of being called true
And the two brothers represent each of these axes, Liam who makes his home in a tiny island off the Dunlough coast, and Pad who, until eventually persuaded to return home by Liam, roams the world working on ships.
My decision to give up my life in the machine rooms
and shaft alleys of freighters
or in drab, noisy harbourside hotels
and, like a castaway, to seek dry land
on Horse Island, a rock in the Atlantic,
touched on a longing that tied me
to many emigrant relatives,
scattered over three continents,
and also to my brother -
a longing for something
he invoked in one of his letters
as an immovable place beneath
an immovable sky
The two brothers became interested in climbing via the “training” their father made them undertake in the Caha Mountains as part of his paramilitary obsession. Liam is the favourite son, participating enthusiastically, whereas Mousepad’s timidity earned their father’s scorn, although Liam keeps his sexuality secret from his conservative patriach.
Liam’s 'immovable place under an immovable sky' is not just the rock on which he lives but also, his obsession, a Tibetan mountain he glimpses in a 19th century photo, which he believes to be an undiscovered (at least in the West) peak, a flying mountain which soars into the sky.
one could make out
beyond a glacier-covered saddle
another ridge that seemed to sweep
forcefully and steeply up towards
a second peak, even higher than the battlements
of the visible wall of ice!
Liam trains Pad on Horse Island before the brothers journey to Tibet, a journey whose purposes has to be hidden from the Chinese authorities. They are taken to a group of nomads who, while regarding sherpa style duties as beneath their dignity, are happy to let the brothers accompany them to their pasture grounds at high altitude, where the mountain the brothers seek is known to them. For Nymea, a widowed single mother (her husband killed by Chinese troops) with whom Pad develops a strong relationship, the peak is also known as flying mountain, Phur Ri in her language, but it has a very different context. In her legends, the mountains had flown to the aid of humankind:
flown to them at a time
when humans began to raise themselves
from the animal kingdom in which they had
hitherto been trapped, and could at last
throw back their heads
and look up at the sky,
at the passing clouds.
It was then, and no earlier, that the mountains
settled on plains, deserts, meadows and savannahs
so that this feeble race, so exposed
to the snow and all kinds of storms
might have leeward slopes on which grass
for its livestock and herbs would flourish, offering spots
for fires and tents, shelter and room to live.
...
However huge and immovable
these mountains might appear now, Nyema had said,
none of them would remain
in the human world for ever; one after the other,
they would lift off once again one day
and disappear whence they had come
Having started his account with his brother’s death, and his own narrow escape, on the descent of Phur Ri, Pad, writing from Horse Island as he disposes of his brother’s possessions and prepares to return to a life in the mountains of Tibet, reflects on the story that led up to this point. The brothers’ life histories, Liam’s discovery of Phur Ri, and the tale of their expedition and fatal ascent.
There are some implicit links in the novel between the British / Irish situation and the Chinese control of Tibet, made most explicit with the naming of the world's highest mountain after the (Welsh not English, although this isn't mentioned in the book) surveyor George Everest (who, although this isn't mentioned in the book, actually opposed the idea) despite the British team merely surveying it and not actually discovering, let alone ascending it, and it already having given names, in Nepali Sagarmāthā and Tibetan as Chomolungma.
While Ireland, under its English masters, was sliding
into the most disastrous famine in its history,
Sir Everest and his fellows were sizing up
even choicer pickings for an insatiable Majesty
in London: Indian colonies! Tea plantations
against a picturesque backdrop of mountain chains
whose triangulation from a safe distance
produced unheard of summit heights;
twenty, twenty-five, twenty-nine thousand feet!
Approximately at least!
The remote Irish setting of the non-climbing parts of the novel reflects Ransmayr's own time living in the area, and it was fascinating to discover that the story of the two brother climbing an unconquered mountain, and one dying on the descent, was inspired by the real life, and highly controversial in the world of mountaineering, story of Günther and Reinhold Messner. Reinhold is now a long-standing friend of the author, and has taken him to altitude in Tibet and Nepal.
see here for the story of the Messner brothers https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/aug/19/barbaramcmahon
and here for an interview with Messner and Ransmayr http://sz-magazin.sueddeutsche.de/texte/anzeigen/42048/Man-kommt-nie-wieder-wirklich-zurueck
The final story in this novel itself is very different - e.g. the Messner's were expert climbers not rank amateurs like the Irish pair - but Ransmayr has drawn heavily on his own experience climbing with Messner as well as anecdotes from the latter's experience such as the 'black snow' the two brothers experience on the mountain:
I was alive.
It was snowing.
Black snow?
Black snow.
Like charred,
shredded paper from an invisible fire,
black flakes came tumbling
out of the cloudless sky.
This turns out to the bodies of frozen butterflies, who ascended too high, a phenomenon Messner has actually witnessed, but this paper from Edinburgh University (https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/portal/files/8206025/Black_Flakes.pdf) argues that such images of black flakes are a recurring motif in Ransmayr and hark back to the holocaust.
A fascinating work and one that will remain with me but I have some reservations.
The “flying line” prose fits the narrative but felt, at least in English, as something of a gimmick, a format that perhaps lends the text a lyrical air that the words themselves don’t always justify. Various twitter accounts and internet sites that manufacture apparent poetry from banal words (e.g. instruction manuals) rather make this point - see e.g. http://verbatimpoetry.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/one-of-my-hermits-is-moulting.html. Indeed I soon found myself looking through it and reading the book as normal prose.
And the story itself only really flies when in the mountains. The descriptions of the scenery and the local customs and beliefs really do soar but the parts dealing with the brothers’ lives before the fatal climb, particularly their dangerously eccentric father, remain in the lowlands.
six thousand, eight hundred and forty metres above the sea,
and stared through a thick flurry of flakes
at the plumes of ice above Phur-Ri,
at the dazzling peak of the Flying Mountain,
where I had carved
our names in the snow
with the handle of my ice-pick.
I was alive.
The final book from the MBI longlist, and perhaps the one where my feelings are most ambiguous. Ultimately I wouldn't see this as a winner, but it is hovering near my personal shortlist.
Christoph Ransmayr's 2006 novel Der fliegende Berg has been translated into English by Simon Pare as The Flying Mountain - a long-overdue and highly welcome translation given the flurry of translations into other languages (French, Italian, Croatian, Dutch, Polish, Slovenian, Serbian and Hungarian) that rapidly followed its publication.
One apparent barrier to translation is Ransmayr's use of broken - or his preferred term, flying - lines, although he sees this as prose rather than poetry, from his introduction:
Since most poets have abandoned metrical language and now, instead of verses, use free rhythms and floating lines arranged in stanzas, here and there a misunderstanding has arisen that any text consisting of floating lines, ie, lines of unequal length, is poetry. That is incorrect. A floating line – or better: a flying line – is free and does not belong to poets alone.
Although this also means the translation isn't constrained by any specific rhyme or metrical pattern, it still leaves the challenge of reproducing the cadence of the line-breaks as Pare explained in an interview with the MBI:
I had a lot of fun playing with the line breaks and finding a rhythm in English that mirrored the unique cadence Christoph Ransmayr has created in German by writing prose that resembles poetry. Reconciling such apparent opposites is absolutely essential to this novel, especially relating to the phenomena encountered at high altitude and sea level, and it was enthralling to test how the vocabulary and atmosphere of one could be applied to the other. The Flying Mountain strains syntax and language and yet, if I have done my job properly, it should be as pleasurable to read as it is in German.The story itself is rather simpler than the prose style - indeed were this written in plain text it wouldn't be a particularly long book. It tells of two Irish brothers, Liam and Pádraic (nicknamed Mousepad or Pad by his brother), the latter our narrator. The novel opens dramatically as Pádraic tells us:
I died
six thousand, eight hundred and forty metres above sea level
on the fourth of May in the Year of the Horse.
My deathplace
lay at the foot of an ice-armoured needle of rock
in whose lee I had survived the night.
The air temperature at the time of my death
was minus 30 degrees Celsius
and I saw the moisture
of my final breath crystallize
and disperse like smoke into the light of dawn.
I felt no cold. I was in no pain.
The pulsing of the wound in my left hand
was strangely dulled.
Through the bottomless chasms at my feet
fists of cloud came drifting from the south-east.
The ridge leading from my shelter up and up
to the pyramidal peak
was lost in driving banners of ice,
but the sky above the highest heights
remained so deep a blue
that in it I thought I could make out the constellations
of Boötes, Serpens and Scorpio.
The German, for comparison:
Ich starb
6840 Meter über dem Meeresspiegel
am vierten Mai im Jahr des Pferdes.
Der Ort meines Todes
lag am Fuß einer eisgepanzerten Felsnadel,
in deren Windschatten ich die Nacht überlebt hatte.
Die Lufttemperatur meiner Todesstunde
betrug minus 30 Grad Celsius,
und ich sah, wie die Feuchtigkeit
meiner letzten Atemzüge kristallisierte
und als Rauch in der Morgendämmerung zerstob.
Ich fror nicht. Ich hatte keine Schmerzen.
Das Pochen der Wunde an meiner linken Hand
war seltsam taub.
Durch die bodenlosen Abgründe zu meinen Füßen
trieben Wolkenfäuste aus Südost.
Der Grat, der von meiner Zuflucht
weiter und weiter
bis zur Psyramide des Gipfels emporführte,
verlor sich in jagenden Eisfahnen,
aber der Himmel über den höchsten Höhen
blieb von einem so dunklen Blau,
daß ich darin Sternbilder zu erkennen glaubte:
den Bärenhüter, die Schlange, den Skorpion.
We soon learn that the two have been caught in a storm while climbing alone in the Himalayas on an unclimbed peak, Phur Ri, and that Pad actually survives his near-death experience, saved by Liam, only for Liam to die later on, swept away by an avalanche.
Their father was a fanatical Irish nationalist, a terrorist supporter (if not an active participant). His nationalism (when not in the form of plans for military campaigns against the Brits) takes two opposite yet consistent forms, a strong attachment to his locality and a proprietary interest in the Irish diaspora:
It was this Ireland
that so many emigrants' dreams
or sheer poverty had spun into an endless web
a cat's cradle spanning Australia and both Americas,
New Zealand and various South Pacific islands,
the shores of Indonesia and southern Africa,
that my father finally felt was grand enough,
big enough, to merit
the distinction of being called true
And the two brothers represent each of these axes, Liam who makes his home in a tiny island off the Dunlough coast, and Pad who, until eventually persuaded to return home by Liam, roams the world working on ships.
My decision to give up my life in the machine rooms
and shaft alleys of freighters
or in drab, noisy harbourside hotels
and, like a castaway, to seek dry land
on Horse Island, a rock in the Atlantic,
touched on a longing that tied me
to many emigrant relatives,
scattered over three continents,
and also to my brother -
a longing for something
he invoked in one of his letters
as an immovable place beneath
an immovable sky
The two brothers became interested in climbing via the “training” their father made them undertake in the Caha Mountains as part of his paramilitary obsession. Liam is the favourite son, participating enthusiastically, whereas Mousepad’s timidity earned their father’s scorn, although Liam keeps his sexuality secret from his conservative patriach.
Liam’s 'immovable place under an immovable sky' is not just the rock on which he lives but also, his obsession, a Tibetan mountain he glimpses in a 19th century photo, which he believes to be an undiscovered (at least in the West) peak, a flying mountain which soars into the sky.
one could make out
beyond a glacier-covered saddle
another ridge that seemed to sweep
forcefully and steeply up towards
a second peak, even higher than the battlements
of the visible wall of ice!
Liam trains Pad on Horse Island before the brothers journey to Tibet, a journey whose purposes has to be hidden from the Chinese authorities. They are taken to a group of nomads who, while regarding sherpa style duties as beneath their dignity, are happy to let the brothers accompany them to their pasture grounds at high altitude, where the mountain the brothers seek is known to them. For Nymea, a widowed single mother (her husband killed by Chinese troops) with whom Pad develops a strong relationship, the peak is also known as flying mountain, Phur Ri in her language, but it has a very different context. In her legends, the mountains had flown to the aid of humankind:
flown to them at a time
when humans began to raise themselves
from the animal kingdom in which they had
hitherto been trapped, and could at last
throw back their heads
and look up at the sky,
at the passing clouds.
It was then, and no earlier, that the mountains
settled on plains, deserts, meadows and savannahs
so that this feeble race, so exposed
to the snow and all kinds of storms
might have leeward slopes on which grass
for its livestock and herbs would flourish, offering spots
for fires and tents, shelter and room to live.
...
However huge and immovable
these mountains might appear now, Nyema had said,
none of them would remain
in the human world for ever; one after the other,
they would lift off once again one day
and disappear whence they had come
Having started his account with his brother’s death, and his own narrow escape, on the descent of Phur Ri, Pad, writing from Horse Island as he disposes of his brother’s possessions and prepares to return to a life in the mountains of Tibet, reflects on the story that led up to this point. The brothers’ life histories, Liam’s discovery of Phur Ri, and the tale of their expedition and fatal ascent.
There are some implicit links in the novel between the British / Irish situation and the Chinese control of Tibet, made most explicit with the naming of the world's highest mountain after the (Welsh not English, although this isn't mentioned in the book) surveyor George Everest (who, although this isn't mentioned in the book, actually opposed the idea) despite the British team merely surveying it and not actually discovering, let alone ascending it, and it already having given names, in Nepali Sagarmāthā and Tibetan as Chomolungma.
While Ireland, under its English masters, was sliding
into the most disastrous famine in its history,
Sir Everest and his fellows were sizing up
even choicer pickings for an insatiable Majesty
in London: Indian colonies! Tea plantations
against a picturesque backdrop of mountain chains
whose triangulation from a safe distance
produced unheard of summit heights;
twenty, twenty-five, twenty-nine thousand feet!
Approximately at least!
The remote Irish setting of the non-climbing parts of the novel reflects Ransmayr's own time living in the area, and it was fascinating to discover that the story of the two brother climbing an unconquered mountain, and one dying on the descent, was inspired by the real life, and highly controversial in the world of mountaineering, story of Günther and Reinhold Messner. Reinhold is now a long-standing friend of the author, and has taken him to altitude in Tibet and Nepal.
see here for the story of the Messner brothers https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/aug/19/barbaramcmahon
and here for an interview with Messner and Ransmayr http://sz-magazin.sueddeutsche.de/texte/anzeigen/42048/Man-kommt-nie-wieder-wirklich-zurueck
The final story in this novel itself is very different - e.g. the Messner's were expert climbers not rank amateurs like the Irish pair - but Ransmayr has drawn heavily on his own experience climbing with Messner as well as anecdotes from the latter's experience such as the 'black snow' the two brothers experience on the mountain:
I was alive.
It was snowing.
Black snow?
Black snow.
Like charred,
shredded paper from an invisible fire,
black flakes came tumbling
out of the cloudless sky.
This turns out to the bodies of frozen butterflies, who ascended too high, a phenomenon Messner has actually witnessed, but this paper from Edinburgh University (https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/portal/files/8206025/Black_Flakes.pdf) argues that such images of black flakes are a recurring motif in Ransmayr and hark back to the holocaust.
A fascinating work and one that will remain with me but I have some reservations.
The “flying line” prose fits the narrative but felt, at least in English, as something of a gimmick, a format that perhaps lends the text a lyrical air that the words themselves don’t always justify. Various twitter accounts and internet sites that manufacture apparent poetry from banal words (e.g. instruction manuals) rather make this point - see e.g. http://verbatimpoetry.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/one-of-my-hermits-is-moulting.html. Indeed I soon found myself looking through it and reading the book as normal prose.
And the story itself only really flies when in the mountains. The descriptions of the scenery and the local customs and beliefs really do soar but the parts dealing with the brothers’ lives before the fatal climb, particularly their dangerously eccentric father, remain in the lowlands.
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