Two Sherpas

Starred review from November 21, 2022
Argentine novelist Daniell debuts with an evocative portrait of two Nepalese sherpas and their contrasting aspirations. It opens with Young Sherpa, a teenager, looking down upon the body of a fallen English mountaineer with Older Sherpa, a colleague in his mid-30s, whose understated and open-ended response to the incident speaks volumes to his younger colleague: “These people,” Older Sherpa says with a sweep of his hand, which Young Sherpa takes to encompass more than the tourists who attempt to climb Everest. Young Sherpa has more than once summited the mountain while Older Sherpa has not yet made it to the top, and Daniell draws distinctions between the two in other ways. After Young Sherpa lands a role in a high school production of Julius Caesar, Daniell’s extended summary of the play suggests Older Sherpa is Marullus to Young Sherpa’s Flavius. (Daniell also compares them to Renoir and the younger Monet.) As the two sherpas philosophize on the nature of their work, Daniell reveals a fascinating universe in scintillating prose, precisely translated by Croft. Here’s Young Sherpa considering a career in naval engineering while taking in a Himalayan view: “Blindness and bioluminescence. Tentacular electricity that discloses the dark of the ocean at night.” It’s a stunner.

February 1, 2023
An Englishman's unfortunate fall during a trek up Mount Everest cracks open a philosophical rift between his two guides. "These people," an older Sherpa mutters to his younger companion, when their employer, a British climber, succumbs to brutal misfortune on Mount Everest. These two derisive words serve as a catalyst for Argentine writer Mart�nez Daniell's expansive, engrossing novel, which excavates the two Sherpas' winding paths to arrive at that moment and plots their divergent futures while also surveying themes of colonialism, nationalism, history, science, philosophy, and drama. Mart�nez Daniell triangulates tension between the two guides but also situates them against the past and present encroachments of foreign climbers. The prose is a marvel of resonant metaphor, one steeped in Western canonical references (itself a comment on cultural imperialism). As the young Sherpa prepares for a school production of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, his only spoken line, the first of the play, applies just as well to the tourist visitors his people must serve: "Hence! Home, you idle creatures, get you home!" At one point, Mart�nez Daniell invokes Faust's competing theories of the Earth's evolution, positing the older Sherpa as a vulcanist and the younger as a neptunist (he considers a career in naval engineering, after all). Few novelists (and their translators!) can so seamlessly zoom in on the nape of a father's neck (the younger Sherpa's only memory of his father) and widen the aperture to consider lichen (that "two-faced Janus of the botanical order") stranded in outer space. An ambitiously inventive, profoundly intelligent trek through highly personal experiences of lingering imperialism.

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October 16, 2023
A contemplative, dual-POV rumination on Mount Everest, aging, and the perils and wonder of adventure, Two Sherpas invites readers to think about the fearless titular sherpas as protagonists--as people with pasts and futures and hopes and fears--rather than side characters born to assist in the feats of others. The novel is bookended by the fall of a British climber and the decision that must be made by the two sherpas accompanying him. What unfolds between is a thought-provoking exploration, with Argentine author Daniell's meditative prose beautifully translated by Croft, and a tight story that invites the reader to push at its walls and stretch it, all while feeling the claustrophobia of the mountain itself. How can a sherpa, known for one thing, try to be so much more? What have colonialism and decades of servitude done to a whole group of people, and how does all this come to a head when lives are on the line in more ways than one? This adventure, riveting from start to finish, invites the reader to experience the chill and danger of the mountain's peak. This novel in translation transcends alpinism.

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