It features some of the most transcendent, crystalline moments in modern prose, and yet it is, in the same breath, and at every turn, about anger and pain and fear, and its protagonist is as impatient and far from Buddhist tolerance on his way down from his transcendent moments as on his way up. The Snow Leopard is a liberating book, I am tempted to say, in part because it is not about conventional goodness. The sweet letter, included where a less forthright author would omit it, ensures that this will not be a tale of ordinary heroism. Part of the tension of the book, at least for me, comes not in wondering if the team’s provisions will run out, if the passes will be shut off by snow, if the porters will return–though all are real and vivid dangers–but in seeing what it is Matthiessen will find to bring back to compensate for his desertion. And as the climb goes on, he thinks back to Alex and Deborah more and more, sees his boy dressing up (as a skeleton) for Halloween, is suddenly taken back to him even when he hears a woodpecker. He notes, unsentimentally, that he and his late wife had come close to divorce only five months before her death. Matthiessen, by contrast–and this is part of the honesty and unflinchingness that I take the book and the climb to be about–tells us whom he’s letting down.
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