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“The Englishman was walking between them; the young Sherpa was bringing up the rear. They had come to a curve. To the left, the slope; to the right, the void. It wasn't complicated….The old Sherpa heard that tsk and turned his head. He saw that the Englishman was stumbling, moving his arms like rattan blades, wanting to regain his balance. A mistake. The best option, always, is to fall.”

During the journey up Everest, the young Sherpa reflects on his father’s death and his upcoming role as Flaivus in a local theater production of Shakespear’s Julius Caesar. And though he was currently working as a mountain guide, he considers the pros and cons of various fields of study he would like to pursue.

“In this sense, the young Sherpa would argue, the monetary covenant is simply an imposition in the circulation of gifts. In order to accomplish the ascent, the tourist has to pay, not to fulfil a commercial requirement, but rather as penitence, as loss: the price of attaining understanding. If the tourist pays, it is because that pecuniary release is what sets him on the path to revelation.”

On the trek up the slopes, the old Sherpa thinks back sentimentally to his chance encounter with the teary-eyed Rabbit. Also having just started work as a mountain guide, he reexamines critically the consequences of European colonialism and his role as a “porter” for western tourists.

“He would insist that the commercial equation that arises between tourist and Sherpa is riddled with asymmetries. He would suggest that the tourist, no matter how sizeable the fortune he pays, does so through a prism that condemns the Sherpas to objectification. The old Sherpa sees himself more as an artefact. In terms of classical economics, the Sherpa is neither demand nor supply, but rather merchandise, tradable goods; capital, at most. We are tractors, the old Sherpa would say. Machines capable of performing human tasks better and faster. Worse still, he'd say: we are machines predating the Industrial Revolution. We are animals. The tourists reduce us to animality….They see it as perfectly logical for Sherpas to summit. They ought to think of us as Titans, deities with powers unattainable by mere mortals. But they don't.”

underapileofbooks's review

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challenging reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character

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