Five novels, four essays, two stories, a collection of texts and one of interviews… Below are brief reviews of thirteen works highlighted in this forty-fifth week of the year.
Collection. “News from the tops”, by Dino Buzzati
Head to K2 or, more modestly, the Great Dolomites. With the wonderful Dino Buzzati (1906-1972) as a guide, the reader will be left breathless on the scree, sweat blood and water in the middle of the moraines, dig steps with an ice ax in the living ice or tear the skin. His hands on the rough edges… but it doesn’t unscrew. In fact, we do not leave aside these News from the tops. Journalist, painter, writer and master of fantastic realism, author of Tatar Desert (ed. Robert Laffont, 1949) was also an experienced mountaineer, as demonstrated by this anthology of articles published between the years 1920 and 1950 in the Corriere della Sera and brought together in volume for the first time.
Buzzati talks about summits, glaciers and needles. But also men who have become legends of mountaineering – such as Antonio Berti, Tita Piaz or Walter Bonatti – these brave “Conquerors of the useless” (Lionel Terray) able to go “higher than the crows, where no one could come looking for them”. And, if it evokes tragic avalanches or vertiginous falls, Buzzati also dedicates deliciously unexpected pages to “miracle” great expeditions (“Everyone was supposed to die but the mountain decided otherwise”). Added to these unpublished articles is a diary kept in the summer of 1930 and used, like the rest of the volume, by a passionate pen, of great alacrity and great precision.
But how cruel it is to read all this a hundred years later! At the moment when “Crazy weather is melting glaciers and causing rocks to collapse”and where is Everest “transformed into a garbage dump by countless commercial expeditions” who attack him. This is the reality that the travel writer Paolo Rumiz timely reminds us in his elegant preface. As if to summon us to recover as soon as possible, if we do not want the beloved peaks of Buzzati to become a desert of barbarians tomorrow. Fl.N.
“News from the peaks” (I fuorilegge della montagna. Uomini, cime, imprese), by Dino Buzzati, translation from Italian by Delphine Gachet, Arthaud, 320 p., 22 euros, digital 15 euros.
Novel. “The women of our lives”, by Canesi & Rahmani
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