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Ascent (1975)

by Ludwig Hohl

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705375,617 (3.81)1
Fiction. Translated from the German by Donna Stonecipher. Two young men with very different personalities set out to climb a mountain. Ull, decisive and competent, has his eye on the goal: the summit. Johann, irresolute, is just along for the climb; after several setbacks, he gives up and turns back. Ull continues on—despite the near impossibility of summiting along, and ignoring all warning signs—determined to reach the summit in defiance of his friend. "Hohl is a great discovery, an unjustly neglected author."—Susan Bernofsky… (more)
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Een dusdanig wonderlijk rijke taal van meanderende frasen, plechtstatige beschrijvingen van de meest precieze handelingen en gedachten, en meeslepend beeldende woordenschat zou je in een bergbeklimmersrelaas niet verwachten.

Bergtocht is dan ook meer dan slechts een korte anekdote over twee klimmers die enkele dagen doorbrengen op de Zwitserse kammen. Het is een bijzonder gelaagde psychologische parabel over de menselijke staat, de onverzoenbare eigenheid van karakters en het noodlot.

Wie aandachtig leest ziet de tweespalt reeds gesymboliseerd vanaf het begin op het terras in het dal, en meest magistraal tijdens het wachten op geschikter weer op de Helling der melancholie, wanneer de anders zo expressieve Ull zich in stilte richt op de details rondom hem en de introverte Johann net dan een vergezicht in het vizier krijgt wat hem tot weidse, diepe gedachten brengt, maar... deze ervaring — dan toch weer getrouw aan zijn aard — niet met de ander deelt.

Voeg hierbij een droom over een beer en enkele hallucinaties tengevolge van ontbering, twijfel en onrust, en men is er zich gauw van bewust dat deze novelle, hoewel bij wijlen uitzonderlijk technisch ogend, geen heroïsche berghistorie, noch een egocentrische klimmersbio is, en waarom Leesmagazijn het gelukkig nodig achtte dit miskende dan wel over het hoofd geziene meesterwerkje te publiceren. ( )
  rapiaria | Jul 29, 2018 |
Conventional Work by a Possibly Unconventional Writer

Some years ago George Steiner named Ludwig Hohl as one of the greatest 20th century authors. "Die Notizien" is his central work; it is 900 pages long and still untranslated. I read this to get a sense of him, but it seems to be a singular piece, by which he can't be judged.

Steiner's judgment, which is widely repeated on the internet, is that Hohl is "one of the secret masters of twentieth century prose... a voyeur into the nuances and tremors of sensibility. Hohl experienced physical and psychological phenomena as interminably fragmented. with disenchanted scruple, he fitted these fragments into a language-mosaic of exceptional lucidity" He wrote, according to Steiner, "from a literal underground, from a cellarage or below street level-cavern in Geneva. There, the teeming notes and aphorisms that constitute his opus (Die Notizen) in an always provisional, mobile array, were hung on clothes lines for inspection and revision" (Steiner, Grammars of Creation, p. 224).

I haven't yet read "Die Notizien," but if Steiner's report is accurate (by which I mean, not overdetermined by his worshipful attitude to isolated genius), then "The Ascent" must have been a kind of counterbalance to him. It is absolutely unified, and it has a very conventional, even geomtric, structure.

It's an extremely carefully written realist alpine story, with a simple character puzzle drawn like a moral at the end. Its descriptions of mountain phenomena -- seracs, couloirs, a Bergschrund -- are patient, rational, even architectonic, and its characterizations of the two mountaineers are spare and schematic. It's hard to see how this is a modernist's text: it could have been written by Georg Simmel or even Adalbert Stifter, and its roots go back to Buechner's "Lenz." I am hoping that "Die Notizien" is this novella's sprawling and uncommunicative opposite. ( )
1 vote JimElkins | May 18, 2016 |
A Romantic (but unromantic) Alpine parable, as clean and dangerous as the windswept heights of its setting – Ascent is (I think) the only translated work of Swiss literary recluse Ludwig Hohl, who lived and died in relative obscurity but has become somewhat unburied, to use the fashionable Goodreads idiom, by subsequent writers in Switzerland and elsewhere, many of whom have named him as a key influence.

Like a good whisky – though perhaps schnapps would be a better image – the book can be polished off in an hour or two, but it has what tasters call a long, long finish. There are two characters: one tall, gaunt, impulsive, and the other shorter, more methodical; they are attempting to scale a mountain in challenging conditions some time early in the last century. That is all Hohl works with in terms of plot; the rest is a combination of character study and pitiless observations of the natural world, observations infused with that mixture of glory, beauty and terror that used to be subsumed under the word awe:

The power comes from the wealth of green, the immensity of the mountains, the light of the sky, which is so big that the sky can't yet be blue; its future blue waits behind a brightness, a shifting, shimmering white, the color of pewter (the sun shines first on the highest mountains, not here for a long time yet).

At least for a non-climber like me, the mountains here have an otherworldly air; they comprise a completely alien world full of obscure features like seracs, couloirs, and bergschrunds. There is something metaphysical to Hohl's descriptions of them, too – a sense in which they have (as he says at one point of the rock formations) ‘joined forced with infinity’. But Hohl makes a point of distinguishing this quasi-spiritual awareness from any out-and-out supernatural tendency, and he does so in a particularly literary way, by borrowing – at a critical point in the story – an uncredited line from Schiller's ‘Alpenjäger’. The original full stanza, from which Hohl lifts the first couplet, runs like this:

With his hand the Deity
Shields the beast that trembling sighs;
"Must thou, even up to me,
Death and anguish send?" he cries,—
Earth has room for all to dwell,—
"Why pursue my loved gazelle?"


Here a mountain spirit is manifesting itself in order to save a chamois from a pursuing hunter. And it is precisely this deus ex machina (or rather, deus ex…erm, ablative case…monte) that Hohl denies in his own fable. Here, the mountains are infinitely more real and dangerous than in Schiller's ballad—

But no spirit came out of a cleft in the rock.

The climbers are on their own, and their individual fates will depend on their own individual personalities. And how much influence do we really have on that, when it comes down to it? ( )
  Widsith | Dec 8, 2014 |
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En ce début d'été, de bon matin, au coeur des Alpes, à l'intersection de deux vallées, sur des chaises en fer vertes, à la terrasse d'un café encore endormi, deux hommes sont assis ; à leur allure et à leur équipement, on reconnaît sans peine des alpinistes (épais vêtements de laine et chapeaux de feutre, sacs à dos, une corde enroulée sur l'un deux, longs piolets et lourdes chaussures cloutées - l'histoire se passe dans les années vingt de ce siècle).
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Fiction. Translated from the German by Donna Stonecipher. Two young men with very different personalities set out to climb a mountain. Ull, decisive and competent, has his eye on the goal: the summit. Johann, irresolute, is just along for the climb; after several setbacks, he gives up and turns back. Ull continues on—despite the near impossibility of summiting along, and ignoring all warning signs—determined to reach the summit in defiance of his friend. "Hohl is a great discovery, an unjustly neglected author."—Susan Bernofsky

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