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<\/p>\nBy C. D. Rose.<\/p>\n
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Zsuzanna Gahse, Mountainish<\/a><\/em>, tr. Katy Derbyshire (Prototype, 2024)<\/p>\n Zsuzsanna Gahse\u2019s Mountainish<\/em> is a slim book with short, numbered sections rather than chapters, and whose blurb promises the reader \u2018a multi-layered typology of all things mountainish.\u2019 These days, on receiving such a book, a reader might easily anticipate what they\u2019re in for: reflections on all manner of interesting ephemera; odd encounters with random strangers who\u2019ll tell oblique stories; a few chunks of auto-ish fiction. Mountainish<\/em> doesn\u2019t disappoint on this front, and yet, as soon as we get to section 5, which ends with the narrator ruminating on how bacteria are like \u2018harmless clowns that take pleasure from plopping,\u2019 we realise that our expectations are about to be confounded.<\/p>\n Mountainish<\/em>, you will be pleased to know (or disappointed, perhaps, depending on your persuasion), is not a book in which sheer cliff faces are scaled, blizzards are fought or flags are erected on lofty peaks. No voids are touched and nothing is done because it was there. This is a book with no tales of derring-do (though there are several accounts of people, or other things, falling off mountains). Rather than for the base-layered, fleeced and cramponed person in your life, Mountainish<\/em> is more for those who would arrive to have a look at some huge mountains and then, weirded out, instantly turn round and go home, to somewhere reassuringly flat and low.<\/p>\n The book, however, certainly does not render mountains mundane. The sublime here is found elsewhere. If Mountainish<\/em> is \u2018about\u2019 anything (other than mountains, which are its starting point rather than its destination) it\u2019s about lists, notebooks and classifications; it\u2019s about the strangeness of human behaviour when faced with ultra-massive, ancient chucks of stone; it\u2019s about how we make life comprehensible. Caves features heavily, and this book has a cave-like quality, not vast caverns of wonder but curious small spaces which underlie the ground we stand on. This isn\u2019t a book about the sublime but about how we deal with it.<\/p>\n It is also a book about language, not only the language of mountain-ness itself (there is lots of focus on adjectives \u2013 of colour, shape and size \u2013 though all of these are examined carefully and mostly discarded as if in rejection of the great canon of MountainLit) but also of how nuances of pronunciation and micro-dialects dwell and thrive in mountains, not unlike those clownish bacteria. A huge mention here must go to Katy Derbyshire, who has done an amazing job of taking Gahse\u2019s detailed study of and games with the minutiae of languages and cast them into engaging and highly-readable English.<\/p>\n Mountainish<\/em> is, as far as I can tell, only the second of Gahse\u2019s works to be published in English (Dalkey Archive seem to have put out Volatile Texts: Us Two<\/em>, translated by Chenxin Jiang in 2017), though she has an extensive bibliography. It is to be hoped that Derbyshire (and the good people at Prototype) will once again don some stout walking shoes to guide us through more of them.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n ABOUT THE REVIEWER<\/strong> Mountainish<\/em>, you will be pleased to know (or disappointed, perhaps, depending on your persuasion), is not a book in which sheer cliff faces are scaled, blizzards are fought or flags are erected on lofty peaks. No voids are touched and nothing is done because it was there. This is a book with no tales of derring-do (though there are several accounts of people, or other things, falling off mountains). Rather than for the base-layered, fleeced and cramponed person in your life, Mountainish<\/em> is more for those who would arrive to have a look at some huge mountains and then, weirded out, instantly turn round and go home, to somewhere reassuringly flat and low.<\/p>\n C. D. Rose<\/strong> reviews Mountainish<\/em> by Zsuzanna Gahse<\/strong>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":115912,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-115906","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-criticism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115906","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=115906"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115906\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":115916,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115906\/revisions\/115916"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/115912"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=115906"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=115906"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=115906"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/51280463672_c32bfdbcd8_z.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\nC. D. Rose<\/strong>‘s three books The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure<\/em>, Who\u2019s Who When Everyone Is Someone Else<\/em> and The Blind Accordionist<\/em> form a loose parafictional trilogy about lost books and forgotten writers, about who is forgotten and who remembered, and how, and why. Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea<\/a><\/em>, a collection of short stories, was published in January 2024. You can read an interview with him here<\/a>.
\nTwitter: @cdrose_write<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"