[I read this 2015 novella in two halves, writing about the first half before reading on. Spoiler alert: If you read this running commentary, you will find out everything that happens in the book as I read it.]
24 November 2024
The first half
A whole life? Or edited highlights? Andreas Egger, the taciturn protagonist, is already in his mid-forties by the half-way point, and what we’ve had so far is a series of often anecdotal-sounding episodes. Each is only a few pages long, demarcated by a double line space, and each contains something astonishing, or some understated epiphany, and… and what? I’m not really convinced by any of it and, despite the catalogue of human joy and suffering the undemonstrative narrator describes, I never feel moved by it. The joy is spread very sparsely, in fact, but the amount of incidental pain and death more than makes up for it.
With two exceptions, including the first episode, this is a chronological account. Eggars is an adult at the start of the book, and Seethaler starts as he means to go on. Egger is introduced as someone who acts on a kind of unthinking humane instinct as he does his best to save a man who seems to be dying. It’s the stuff of folk tales as he carries ‘Horned Hannes’ the goatherd from his sickbed, no more than a ‘sour-smelling pallet’ in the mountains, down to the village. Gasping, Hannes tells Egger of the ‘Cold Lady,’ Death, who wanders through the mountains—and before they reach the village he has slipped from Egger’s back and run off. ‘The scrawny figure … quickly diminished until at last it dissolved entirely in the impenetrable whiteness of the blizzard.’ He is never seen again.
Go figure. Or, rather, don’t. In this universe, extraordinary things just happen, and what’s a man to do? Or, in the next mini-chapter, what’s the four-year-old Andreas to do when he arrives at the village to be grudgingly taken in by a boorish farmer? He doesn’t want to have to care for the illegitimate son of his dissolute sister, now dead, so he doesn’t. Egger’s childhood is so bereft of anything, he can remember nothing of his first four years in the mountains—aside from his memory of being almost overwhelmed by their stupendous size and height when he arrived. But there are punishments, and a typical cruel whipping is described—until, one time, the farmer forgets to soak the switch and breaks the boy’s leg. Ah, that’s why the kids were name-calling ‘Gammy Leg!’ as he reached the village in the first episode.
Et cetera. What do you want to know? As a child, Egger doesn’t talk beyond unconnected-sounding words, because why would he? He does learn things, including reading, writing and numbers at a school that opens in the village when he’s already about twelve, but he’s slow. And he keeps himself to himself—which means Seethaler, presenting Egger’s world-view by default, doesn’t have to tell us anything about the village and valley beyond what his man perceives. It isn’t any world we might recognise because it doesn’t need to be. Egger, despite a permanent limp from his uncle’s assault, is strong. At eighteen, for his accidentally breaking a food-bowl his uncle tells him to put the hazel switch in to soak. Which he does, before saying to the man that if he uses it, ‘I will kill you.’ He likes to keep things simple, Egger. His uncle throws him out—which is fine, because a man like Egger can lay his head wherever he likes. Of course he can.
Episodes. Egger works as a general labourer and, imperceptibly—i.e. Seethaler isn’t telling us how it happens—he begins to feel completely at one with the mountain. Where does he end and the mountain begin? He isn’t asking, and it doesn’t matter anyway. By the age of 29 he’s saved enough money to buy a tiny plot of land high up, which offers better views and longer daylight hours than the village. He builds a simple place to live from the stones he finds… etc. My goodness, he’s happy, except… he feels a dull pain in his chest. This is his body’s instinctive way of telling him he’s in love with the new maid at the inn, Marie. He doesn’t know what to do about it, but by his simply being in her presence at church, and other undemonstrative means, she realises he’s interested. They go for walks, saying little or nothing, and clearly she’s made of the same stuff he is.
He’ll need to start earning more money if, in some undefined future, he is to provide for her. As it happens, shortly after that attempt to rescue Horned Hannes in the first chapter, a cable-car company had arrived in the valley. Egger is in his mid-30s, so he’s ready to ask for a job. The manager doesn’t like his limp, but Egger offers one of his infrequent, gnomic responses. ‘On the mountain I’m the only one who walks upright.’ It might not convince the reader, but it convinces the manager. And, of course, Egger is such a part of the mountain he can do anything with it. Climb, hang, drill, chop—you name it.
His most regular winter work is cutting and clearing trees with other men. This gives Seethaler the chance to offer another dark epiphany. The weight of snow falling from a tree splits it and sends a huge shard of wood at one of the men, ripping off his arm. As ever, Seethaler gives us the details, but he also gives us the men’s conversation. The injured man, once he’s regained consciousness as they begin to carry him down the mountain, is philosophical. He tells them to bury the arm—which leads to a discussion about death, and life. Is the man still who he was before, when a part of him no longer exists? Isn’t that what happens all our lives anyway, with strength and powers leaving us bit by bit until we’re dead? It’s conversations like this that make it sound like anecdote. Overheard bar-room conversations are like this.
There’s another dark incident, a landslide that takes aways some of the farms in the valley. Seethaler likes a focus, and a landslide is too vague a thing. So he tells us how a calf on one of the farms, still tethered to a tree, can be seen hurtling down the mountain alongside all the other detritus. And guess what. When they find it dead some days later, downstream in the river with its legs sticking up stiffly, it’s still tied to the tree. A memorable detail? Or another bar-room story to hook us into this weird little world?
Things have been going on for some time between Egger and Marie. But how to ask her to marry him? He—or, let’s face it, Seethaler—wants to do something memorable. What form can a proposal take from a man so utterly fused with the mountain? How can the mountain somehow speak for him? One of the men in his work-party comes up with the idea, and it works like capitalism in miniature. Egger pays seventeen men to take paraffin-soaked bags of sawdust on to a high slope, and arrange them in a predetermined pattern according to instructions and ropes used as guidelines. Egger will be with Marie at the key moment. How does it go? [quote]
They marry, they have as undemonstrably idyllic life as you would expect, Marie eventually becomes pregnant…. What could possibly go wrong? Guess. They live under a snow-covered mountain, landslides and avalanches happen all the time and, one night, Egger hears a strange noise. He leaves the house to search for where it’s coming from, and is suddenly overwhelmed by the force of plummeting snow. He survives, but Marie doesn’t. He is rescued, desolate and with two broken legs. Will life ever be worth living again?
Of course it will, but only just. It takes a long time for him to discover any sort of peace, but many months later his change of job helps him. He’s in cable maintenance now, dangling over high slopes held aloft only by a single rope. It’s while doing this that he finds… what? ‘A sense of calm came over him, and little by little, the black cloud of despairing thoughts that shrouded his heart dissolved in the mountain air, until nothing was left but pure sorrow.’ Bless.
Up to now, Seethaler has been studiously avoiding any references to the outside world. This is Austria in the first half of the 20th Century, and Egger was born in 1898. The First War has come and gone with no mention, but now it’s 1939, and time for a strong Austrian to join up. We discover now that he tried during the First War too, but was told he was too important as a farm worker. Now he isn’t a farm worker, but the recruiting officers mock his age and limp so he goes back to work. Three years later, however, things have changed. Now he is conscripted, tells the officers he’s good in mountains, and is told he’ll be off to the Caucasus on the Eastern Front. Lucky…
…by which I only mean that he will survive. We know this because one of the two occasions when the narrator lets us in on a character’s future life—the other is about the death of one of the lumberjacks in nine years’ time—refers to an incident in the valley when Egger is in his 70s. I’m not sure why Seethaler does this, but maybe it will become clearer. Maybe.
The second half
It doesn’t. Become clearer—the increasingly jumpy chronology, or anything else—except I wasn’t wrong when I wrote that in the first chapter Seethaler starts as he means to go on. He goes on right to the end, and I’m no more convinced or moved by the little epiphany that comes before Egger’s death than I am by any of it. Stuff happens, but not much stuff, and not very often. Which is why the next 30-odd years of Egger’s life can be got through in another 70 pages or so. I suspect that despite so little happening, Seethaler isn’t leaving out anything of importance. A whole life, sure, but only because it’s a life with little or nothing in it.
And yes, I get it. I get why people rate this book so highly. Here is a man who lives through nearly eight mind-boggling decades of the 20th Century hitching a ride on it occasionally if it suits, like his job with the cable-car company, but mostly just letting it pass him by. Isn’t that a wonderful thought, people say. Wouldn’t it be marvellous to just be at one with the mountain and make a simple life from what you find there? In a different culture this man would be a guru, having bypassed all philosophy to reach a kind of Nirvana the rest of us can only dream about.
It doesn’t work for me, either as a philosophy or a work of fiction. After his return from the war—don’t ask, because it consists of seven years of cold and shit that only the default off-switch in his head enabled him to survive—he carries on as before. Hardly any discernible human interactions from the late 1940s to his death thirty years later—except his mountain-man superpower does allow him to make a living simply escorting the participants in the burgeoning tourist trade around the landscape he loves, and be paid for it…
…which leads to one of his two encounters with women in these chapters, both of them uncomfortable. A tourist leans so far back she almost topples from a high bridge to the rocks below, but Egger saves her. The near-death experience affects her to the physical core, and in her gratitude she seems to want to come uncomfortably close to poor old Egger. He only thinks about his personal space when it’s invaded, and he doesn’t like it at all. Then a different kind of closeness comes about when a retired woman teacher comes as a temporary stand-in at the school he now lives next-door to, in a kind of lean-to shed. He complains about the noise, she kicks him out—but then she brings cakes and suggests they go for walks. Can it be a late blossoming for our man? It gets as far, after a lot of almost conversation-free walks, as her effectively dragging him into her bed… but he can’t do it. Marie was the only one for him, and she was almost too much for him. He only sees the new old woman once more before she leaves the valley for good, and he looks down when she waves.
Is Egger’s life in any way ‘whole’? Obviously not, despite the oneness he seems to feel for nature. Does that make him a Romantic archetype, like Wordsworth’s Idiot Boy or Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge—or the nearly mythical Kaspar Hauser? Don’t these lucky people have access to founts of some strange communion with nature that are closed to the rest of us mortals? I would day a definite yes to that—and I suspect that’s what a lot of readers love about this book. Egger, despite the very real hardships and, especially in later life, the chronic pain he lives with is, represents an ideal to be envied.
Or—and this has only just struck me—he’s a satire on 20th Century man. You live your life, you get a job, you marry, you get by. If governments push you around, you do what they say because you haven’t got any alternatives—you can’t think of any, and anyway, you can’t imagine not doing what’s expected. There’s a war, so you’d better join up. And once you do, just make sure you follow orders. And it’s the same with the jobs Egger does. Every day that he worked for the cable-car company, well over ten years, he smashed through the ecosystem he always loved because what else can you do? As the book progresses, the valley is transformed from a Romantic idyll to an ever more built-up tourist honeypot. The old farmers, at first, are bemused by these city types and their desire to coo admiringly at the views or slide down the mountains on their planks of wood, but… what? They change jobs and cater to the tourists’ needs. That’s what people always do do—and the world is transformed irreparably.
In other words, Egger is no more innocent than anybody else. He drifts, and it suits him, because that’s how Seethaler made him. No thoughts, no decisions except three, in his whole life. He goes after Marie. He goes for a proper job. He puts a sign out to advertise his ad hoc walking trips. And tin the final chapter—set six months before he dies, a low-key, complication-free episode in the chapter before—he tells the Cold lady not yet. It seems that unlike Horned Hannes—remember him?—he really can outrun death. Horned Hannes only made it, it transpires, as far as a permanently frozen crevasse, where his broken body is discovered decades later. Maybe Hannes’ mistake was that he wasn’t laid-back enough. It works for Egger. It always works for Egger.
We can read it for you wholesale 