This meditative novel might help you escape the doomscrolling
FICTION
On Not Climbing Mountains
Claire Thomas
Hachette, $32.99
This year is being heralded as the year of the physical. Finally! The idea of more face-to-face time couldn’t come sooner. Phone-free experience! Days spent with loved ones! After several centuries of happy physicality, is the algorithm’s brief siren-call gracefully fading?
The narrator of Claire Thomas’s third novel certainly has her fingers crossed. Following the death of her widowed Swiss schoolteacher father in a road accident, Beatrice Angst returns to his homeland. Forbidding herself from her phone, sick of relying upon “digital maps and slick apps”, she travels, like Lucy Honeychurch in E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View, with a Baedeker travel guide.
Happy to substitute certain technologies for others, Angst treats the Baedeker reverently, enamoured of its print, its status as a “tangible object”. Yet for those of Forster’s era, the Baedeker itself was not so different from the apps of today – a mediated representation of people and locations that placed the impressionable tourist at a remove from the (potentially threatening) flesh-and-blood of life.
Thus the form of On Not Climbing Mountains offers, like a series of gallery installations, its own modes of mediation. Each chapter reflects on artists and figures connected to Switzerland – among them James Baldwin and Charlie Chaplin, Rilke and Patricia Highsmith – via Angst’s narration. Moving back and forth across time and place, Angst relays the details of films, biographies, artworks, histories and written texts as though they were alive and present, providing a kind of analogue to the style of the chapters themselves, each of which the reader wanders through alongside Angst. It is not so much what each chapter means as what it does, creating an experience that the reader, like Angst herself, participates in as an observer, someone who seems to live the experience and yet nonetheless exists at a decided remove from it.
It’s a curious mission: transform mediated experience into something like direct experience. Narrating the work of others becomes a way for Angst, after her father’s passing, to discover “occasional moments of illumination”. Angst’s self-consideration, too, is sometimes filtered through different kinds of media: when she reflects on her childhood and schooling, it is not only via memory but via the scrapbooks and photos she discovers in her father’s study. Angst herself leads a peculiarly solitary existence; we do not learn her name until almost halfway through the book when an uncle addresses her.
Angst confesses “earnestly developing an obsession with literature” at fifteen. Decades later, many of the narratives Angst relays concern youth or childhood: Johanna Spyri’s Heidi; Fleur Jaeggy’s boarding-school novel Sweet Days of Discipline. Yet, Angst’s father is a vague presence, as is her mother. A few weeks before her father’s death, she breaks up with a lover. Single since, she declares herself an “adult orphan” for whom “solitary thinking” is vital. The personal declaration provides context for her introspection, her recurring memories of childhood and personal isolation, many of which are juxtaposed with fears of losing her connection to art, whether in the form of literary achievement (she feels a degree of personal anxiety surrounding artistic longevity), or simply in the desire to find and dedicate herself to a satisfying life of the mind.
Especially interesting are those recurring observations Angst doesn’t remark on. She is often aware of physicality, her proximity to others: entering Antony Gormley’s 2007 installation Blind Light – a large room filled with white vapour, intended to recreate the experience of standing atop a mountain and stepping into a cloud – she feels uncomfortable at the thought of the “odourlesss vapour making its way into my body.” Elsewhere, she recalls memories of childhood medical issues – a possible clue to her alertness about bodily limits.
Angt’s aversion to certain forms of touch and sensory detail suggests everyday experience as risky, filled with disturbing or uncanny potential. Perhaps her feelings are encouraged, in part, by Switzerland’s antiseptic tidiness. One thing almost as haunting as death is the possibility of its erasure, and Switzerland, with its zona del silenzio train carriages and unobtrusive lakes, comprises an otherworldly presence – a “giant conspiracy to keep chaos at bay”.
On Not Climbing Mountains variously expands and reworks the concerns with art and art history that have characterised Thomas’s writing since her debut, Fugitive Blue, appeared in 2008. Reading it, I was reminded of recent social media videos that typically show a young, upwardly mobile person dividing the unmonetised portion of their day into activities that aren’t so dissimilar from the monetised parts: food (nutritious), exercise (vigorous), skincare (ardently applied).
Beatrice Angst is more personable than these avatars of the good life, yet she shares something of their loneliness. I sometimes found myself wishing she might discover fewer connections between the afterlives of art and her own, and a little more of the risky, bustling flesh-and-blood lives of others.
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