Posted on 12/11/2003 3:54:05 PM PST by inPhase
Shrouded in Ice Famed mountaineer Reinhold Messner's latest book raises more questions than it answers
by Tom Vannah - December 11, 2003 COURTESY OF THE MOUNTAINEERS BOOKS Feature On the subject of Reinhold Messner's first really audacious climb, there are a few things we know for sure.
We know, for example, that Messner's objective in June 1970 was to climb to the top of Nanga Parbat, the world's ninth highest mountain, one of the most isolated and dangerous places on earth. Though not as well known to the general public as other peaks in the Himalayas, Nanga Parbat in Pakistan has long been one of climbing's most coveted prizes. Translated from the Urdu, its name means "the Naked Mountain," a description that takes account the dramatic appearance of the icy massif, 22,000 of whose 27,000 feet of total height rise unobstructed from the fertile Indus Valley below. Whereas most mountains in the range are clustered in groups -- often sharing common flanks with neighboring peaks, as Everest does with Lhotse and Nuptse -- Nanga Parbat stands alone.
We also know that the 1970 Nanga Parbat trip was Messner's first Himalayan expedition. The young German-speaking climber from the Italian Tyrol had already demonstrated his incredible prowess in the Dolomites and the Alps. When he received an invitation to join Karl Maria Kerrligkoffer, a notoriously nationalistic German, on an expedition, Messner jumped at the chance and enticed his younger brother, Gunther, also an elite climber, to join him.
Of the rest of what we know for sure, the only truly important facts are these: The Messner brothers set out for the summit together alone, out of communication with their teammates below; and Gunther Messner never returned.
For 30 years, the world of climbing has largely accepted Reinhold Messner's version of events: that he and Gunther made it to the summit of Nanga Parbat via the first and last ascent of the mountain's deadly Rupal Face; that on the descent, stumbling and sick from the altitude, Gunther was swept away in an avalanche; that Reinhold Messner, unable to find his brother's body, wandered alone on the mountain for days, dehydrated and delirious with grief, before escaping through the Diamir Valley. Messner would go on to become a legendary mountaineer, admired for his daring exploits -- he climbed all the world's 14 highest peaks without supplemental oxygen -- and envied for his fame and fortune.
Today, at age 58, Messner is not only one of the world's most respected climbers, but has become an important political voice as a member of the European Parliament, where he forcefully pushes for a variety of environmental causes. Still, Messner is hardly a warm and fuzzy hero in the style of Edmund Hillary. His confidence strikes some as arrogance. His best-selling books are regarded by his detractors as flimsy bits of self-promotion rather than riveting accounts of perilous adventure.
Until recently, however, few of his critics have shown the temerity to take Messner on directly. But that all changed last year.
Following the publication of Messner's The Naked Mountain , a memoir of the 1970 expedition, two of the Messners' teammates, Hans Saler and Max Von Kienlin, penned books that accuse Reinhold of lying about important aspects of that fateful climb on Nanga Parbat. Saler and Kienlin, based on what they observed from lower on the mountain, claim that Gunther never made it to the summit, and that Reinhold, driven by ambition for glory, abandoned his brother, leaving Gunther to die.
Messner responded angrily, insisting that Saler and von Kienlin were mere opportunists, intent on cashing in on their association with the 1970 expedition. He also said von Kienlin, at least, had an ax to grind: Messner had an affair with, and later married, von Kienlin's wife, Ursula Demeter, whom he met following the Nanga Parbat climb while recovering from the amputation of seven toes and several fingertips due to frostbite. Demeter became Messner's wife from 1972 until 1977. Earlier this year, Messner sued his old teammates, persuading a court in Hamburg to order Saler and von Kienlin to remove a number of unsubstantiated, potentially defamatory sections from their books.
As a book about climbing, The Naked Mountain is better than some, but far from the best. Messner can be a truly compelling author, with the ability to transport his reader to remote, icy places where great danger and great beauty are inexorably paired.
The Naked Mountain gets off to a rough start and never really recovers. The first hundred pages are consumed by a history of Nanga Parbat; we don't actually meet brother Gunther until page 95. In a weird preface to the book, Messner dwells on what, given the controversy the book created, would seem to be dangerous ground: "Without consciously wishing to interpret how things occurred in the way they did, I write of the way I experienced my survival and the split between being part of those events and standing apart from them. ... [the] effect on my conscious mind was similar to a state of schizophrenia, as perceptions and emotions faced each other like images of the sun and the moon."
If it's a straight reportorial account you're looking for, Messner has yet to provide it.
Still, for devotees of adventure literature, be they real explorers or the armchair variety, it's a book worth having. Published by The Mountaineers Books, the English translation of Messner's 40th book has a number of virtues. First, it is well made, printed on heavy, glossy stock, featuring hundreds of beautiful photographs. And there are highs in the writing too, when Messner finally gets to his story. In a genre loaded with dry, laboriously detailed accounts of epic climbs -- consider anything by British climber Sir Chris Bonnington, including his 2003 Everest , a tome well worth having for the pictures but otherwise unreadable -- Messner's book is far more lively and emotionally taut than most.
But climbing literature is always about more than an actual climb, about more than the logistics and the hour upon hour of suffering entailed in climbing. To be a great book about climbing, a book must first be good journalism, with a narrator who has fully mastered the difficulty of recounting events witnessed under the nerve-wracking, perception-bending stress of high altitude. The most recent runaway bestseller in the climbing genre, Into Thin Air , Jon Krakauer's narrative about the deadly 1996 season on Everest, rose to the heap of books on the subject because the writer, who reached the summit that year, is also a faithful journalist. When his book inspired a few books written to challenge his version of events, Krakauer chose to tackle the criticism in print, adding a chapter to subsequent editions of Into Thin Air in which he reviews, with a fair degree of professional detachment, alternative accounts.
Messner, by contrast, is argumentative from the start, as if answering criticism that didn't arise publicly until after The Naked Mountain was published. The sign of a guilty conscience? In fact, Messner always has a contentious tone in his writing, as if writing, like climbing, were an act of defiance, a way to set himself apart from, and above, mere mortals.
Some day, the mystery of the 1970 Nanga Parbat climb will undoubtedly be taken up by a more qualified journalist -- just as the famed 1950 expedition to Annapurna was credibly revised a few years ago by David Roberts in the wonderfully gripping True Summit: What Really Happened on the Legendary Ascent of Annapurna. In the meantime, Messner has launched repeated expeditions to Nanga Parbat, intent, he says on finding his brother's body and proving the veracity of his tale. He has vowed to keep looking or die trying -- an endeavor that, if nothing else, has all the makings of a really good book.
All of the stuff from the expeditions to discover the fate of George Leigh-Mallory and Eddie Irvine from the '27 climb is worth reading.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
I just looked online and found out almost everyone in the 96 disaster wrote a book.
The links are from Travel Review Books, with whom I haven't dealt. Just found 'em on the net.
I have a lot of mountaineering books -- I did a couple of South American attempts, but am old and slow and retired from climbing, and have never been within hundreds of miles of Everest -- but haven't read these. I have read Breashears's book but can't recall the title, sorry. It's also good.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F d.o.l.
Lost on Everest: The Search for Mallory & Irvine
P. L. Firstbrook
ISBN: 0809298929
224 pp., McGraw-Hill/Contemporary Books, 1999
The Lost Explorer : Finding Mallory On Mount Everest
Conrad Anker and David Roberts
ISBN: 0684871513
192 pp., Simon & Schuster, 1999
(I bought it on the remainder table in a Barnes & Noble in Princeton, NJ for $4.98 in 2002, while getting ready to go to Afghanistan. I read it over there and brought it home.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
I was afraid to turn the lights out after reading it.
Still creeps me out.
I first heard of Mallory when I was a kid and going through my Battle of Britain reading phase (his brother Trafford was an important air marshal in the war). I never thought at the time that I would get to climb myself.
Another personal hero of mine is Shackleton. What a leader! What a man! And he's not half bad as a writer, either. The miniseries was quite good as well, although it had to find 'the hero's feet of clay'. I thought that Kenneth Branagh was a very believable Shackleton.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
yeah, that is the body they were looking for when they found George. It has got to be in the same area, but without a low-snow year like they lucked into, they'll never find him.
I thought it was Irvine's ax that was found in the thirties near the 2nd step.
Conrad is a superhuman climber, or perhaps a better way to put it is that he is a climber who takes human potential to previously unheard of degrees of efficiency and effectiveness.
The Shackleton miniseries is available on DVD. That's how I saw it; I don't even own a TV. Might be a problem if you are in Europe. (DVD region crap).
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
Darn, I thought this was an article on The Beast.
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