Wandering, dizzying, echoing, gorgeous—spending time with Zsuzsanna Gahse’s Mountainish is not unlike being four thousand metres above sea level; the book conjures both the vastness and the minute details of the Alps with lyrical intuition, while constantly introducing surprising insights into the peaks’ social presentation. Through both a study of mountains and a poetic testament of the mind inside all that landscape, Gahse takes us across what it means to look, listen, feel, and think—with all the awe, fear, beauty, and inequity that is inseparable from our regard of worldly wonders. We are delighted to introduce Mountainish as our Book Club selection for the month, and to be travelling together along the excursions and perceptions of this singular work’s pursuit.
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Mountainish by Zsuzsanna Gahse, translated from the German by Katy Derbyshire, Prototype, 2025
At some point while reading this strange, moreish book, one is likely to suddenly snap out of the trance it has induced, prompting a question into what this work does, and how it exerts its mesmerising effects.
Zsuzsanna Gahse’s Mountainish is a series of numbered notes, 515 in total. Certain sections appear to have come from a diary, while other parts resemble the scrambled embryo of a more substantial literary project—a travelogue, perhaps, or a parody of one. But very often, the notes never coalesce into anything; Mountainish might be best understood as the miscellaneous lint of a compulsive writer, a hodge-podge of scenes, sketches, proddings and testings of turns of phrase. This is not to say, however, that the book is lost to chaos. The numbers appended to the notes provide a semblance of order, and oblique patterns slowly emerge and disperse along the reading. Brief, slight, and faintly whimsical, the notes float by like cloud puffs, and if you look at them for long enough, they take on vaguely recognisable shapes. Within its diaphanous structure, the usual anchors to time and place—chronology, for instance—are done away with completely, leaving the book hovering ambiguously over its subject.
That subject is, more or less, the Alps. Over the course of Mountainish, Gahse touches on its geography, its inhabitants, the experience of traveling the landscape, staying in its hotels, gazing upon its mountains—though without anything so cumbersome or restrictive as an itinerary. We do not know where Gahse is going, where she’s been, or whom she’s travelling with, and certainly not why she is wherever she happens to be. Rather, the notes serve as a record of incipient thoughts plucked directly from the top of her head, which she arranges into a bead-string of consciousness. The writing has the slightly ragged feel that comes from words written at speed and subsequently left to sit unedited, their spirit of evanescence trapped on the page. It’s a delicate exercise that comes with risks, and some of the notes suffer from such a direction transplantation from Gahse’s head to the page. What are we supposed to make, for example, of the one that consists solely of: ‘And amid the mountains stand rock-acquirers, rockobtainers, rock-getters’?
Gahse is completely unafraid of making little sense, and often it works in her favour. The principal upsides are the disarming looseness of the prose, and the thrill of the unexpected connections that such laxity permits. A meditation on bodies proceeds from an image, until we arrive at a golden flash of insight:
Ancient Egyptian immortalisations. Thorough cleansing of the body, removal of the brain and the innards, which are preserved separately. High esteem for the body through embalming. Contrast against our exchangeable organs, like modules these days.
Keeping step with a book like this—which flaunts its artlessness so openly—poses a fearsome challenge for Katy Derbyshire, its translator. The process of translation, with its constant straining for meaning and wording, couldn’t be more different from the spontaneity with which Mountainish appears to have been written. The hard part for Gahse, you imagine, will have been ordering the notes until they achieve their strange, hypnotic coherence; for Derbyshire, the difficulty is almost entirely on the level of its words. It’s testament to her subtlety and skill that the English convinces as a procession of off-the-cuff spitballs.
As ephemeral and fleeting as the notes are, their pace is leisurely and the mood is mostly tranquil. Gahse never grasps for a thought, never belabours her impressions, and is not to be overawed by the majesty of her surroundings; there is none (or almost none) of the lyrical, epiphanic tenor that travel in a scenic place typically inspires in sensitive writer types. Her interest in the Alps is abstract, stinting, and expressed bookishly. She evinces an impulse to probe and taxonomise according to certain favoured lenses—colours, for instance, or names, or ethnography—but the analysis is idle and mostly for fun, with no obligation to exhaust her lines of enquiry. She tends to peter out or become distracted, and you frequently sense her attention flagging as a note comes to its end:
Mountain flanks with clear vertical or oblique lines. Often, these lines have a surprising kink, as though the entirety of the rock had been snapped, and sometimes the lines are horizontal (though this is trivial), the way the layers were originally deposited, without being subsequently shifted. I sketch them to get closer to them, and as I sketch, the stories—not harmless—through which the mountains came about become visible to some extent.
Faced with the physical enormity of the Alps themselves, her musing stays cool, and indeed a little disapproving. On the whole, Gahse isn’t a fan of the mountains: she is cognisant of their beauty in a qualified sort of way, and occasionally taken with this or that characteristic—but the overriding feeling is one of distrust. A description of a mountain is generally a prelude to her imagining it falling on her head, or its glaciers melting to reveal ancient deadly viruses, or someone slipping and plummeting down its rockface. As we’ve already seen with the talk of mummies and corpses, death stalks the pages of this placid book to a surprising degree, where it appears suddenly and at unexpected moments. Gahse will sometimes conclude a note with an image of herself crushed by falling rocks, or mention whole towns being wiped out in an instant by avalanches. In terms of body count, the book is a slaughter, but it wears its morbidness very lightly; Gahse’s preoccupation with death is idle, mostly speculative, and ultimately neutered by the same note of detached whimsy that colours her other observations. The effect is chilling at first, but upon repeated exposure it becomes quite funny. The incongruous mental images it conjures come to feel like Richard Scarry illustrations, with scenes from her travels punctuated by almost slapstick tragedy. Cars rocket round hairpin bends; helicopters, hot-air balloons, and cable cars all motor vividly up and down the mountainside; eccentric hoteliers and café owners ply their trades; neanderthals chill in caves (or literally in glaciers that haven’t yet begun to melt); and on every peak and trail, brave but clumsy hikers tumble off the slopes.
The most interesting strands of Mountainish don’t concern the scenery, but with things going on in the towns and cities below. Gahse’s whimsy captures something true about travel—and indeed life—in the Alps today. This is the heartland of the Schengen Area and its crowning achievement: a sleek technocratic dream of paradise, a place of safety, wealth, and frictionless cross-border travel nestled at the feet of one of the most dramatic and scenic countrysides on the continent, itself tamed and monetised and now, in Gahse’s words, one giant ‘sports facility’. A balm of affluence envelopes everything in this region, from the clean air and natural beauty to the superb infrastructure and quaint villages replete with hybrid workers and modern amenities. Its borders are policed, but discreetly; the international buses and trains run on time. The allure is obvious, as is the vague compulsion Gahse feels to resist it, and it is this latent, vague suspicion of the sterile dreamland that finds voice in the slowly accreting litany of death and complaint. She notices with ambivalence the excellent roads (driven on by maniacs), the benign locals (prone to micro-aggressions), her fellow tourists (tacky boors), the well-funded and numerous arts festivals (popping up ‘like red mosquito bites’), and a variety of transport options, all of it clean and efficient, which shuttle her from one excellent (and expensive) hotel to the next. The impression slowly grows that Gahse is struggling feebly against her own alpine-induced trance, her own ‘Alptraum’. She might be just as confused about what to make of it as we are.
Matthew Redman is the digital editor for Asymptote.
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