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(More customer reviews)August 6, 2005: huddled alone in a small ice hole, between 6100 and 6300 meters on Nanga Parbat's steep Rupal Face, with a snow mushroom hanging menacingly above, Tomaz Humar was arguing over the radio. As his base camp pleaded with him to down climb in order to make a helicopter rescue slightly less improbable, he responded that he was trapped. Avalanches roared on all sides, "If I move even one meter I will be swept down.... It's not only about the descent, I am in a labyrinth, I can go nowhere."
For many who followed the story, in the next few days, Humar's labyrinth would prove to be not just one of ice, rock and snow--but a far more baffling one of the human mind: Why had he gone up the face when he knew the weather forecast was so bad? Why, after stating on his own website that rescue would be impossible, did he now seem to be counting on one? And why would a man with two young children accept this level of risk?
Even as it occurred, Humar's solitary drama was in the process of replicating itself, hourly, on countless computer screens around the world. And from the very opening scene of her biography, Bernadette McDonald encapsulates the essential paradox not only of this one Slovenian climber's life, but also of the world in which he inhabits: while media reports of Humar's plight appeared to have nearly unlimited--even voyeuristic--access to his private agony, Humar seems to have stayed, nonetheless, an enigma to everyone--especially to himself.
When Pakistani helicopter pilots Rashid Ullah Baig and Khalid Amir Rana rescued Humar (putting their own lives in serious danger), many online viewers rejoiced. But throughout much of the climbing community, there remained a prevailing sense that a kind of tragedy had still occurred. Purists saw the high-altitude rescue as a new "murder of the impossible"--the destruction of true adventure, self-reliance and wilderness in one of the most remote places left.
But as McDonald's biography so eloquently hints, beneath Humar's story lies another annihilative act--the violence done to a human self, performed long before Humar started up the Rupal Face. Conscripted into the Yugoslav army in 1988 at age twenty and sent to Kosovo, Humar witnessed war crimes that made him feel as though he had "discovered the bottom of humanity." After his failed attempts to desert, Humar was interned in a detention camp, then abandoned without food or money in a city far from his home. Some local Albanians took him to a train station. When the ticket-seller asked, "Where do you come from?", Humar replied, "I am coming from hell."
To this day, McDonald notes, Humar has preserved the train ticket, leaving the reader to wonder about the extent to which that "hell" has permanently defined his sense of being in the world. Could Humar's depersonalization of his own climbing experiences--through the overwhelming media presence he brought with him to Nanga Parbat--be, in part, a reflection of that earlier, self-shattering encounter with the war?
It's to McDonald's credit that she raises this--and other questions--about Humar, without attempting to answer them fully. Through her intricate, complex portrait, Humar emerges as a man who is, as he himself states, "predictable only in his unpredictability." In contrast to the media circus surrounding the Rupal Face rescue, McDonald describes the virtual news blackout of his recent Annapurna solo and the quietness of other, earlier ascents. Ultimately and wisely, she leaves the final word to her subject: "Every climb is a story in itself," Humar says, explaining the vast differences in his approaches over the years. "You come back changed from each one."
McDonald's thorough research ensures that the reader is able to re-experience each of these stories with richly textured complexity; dramatic, vividly re-created scenes; and harrowing depth. But it's the close connection between its style and content that makes the book a real benchmark in contemporary alpine-climbing biography. Switching points of view from subjective third person (as if the reader is allowed a brief glimpse into Humar's own mind) to omniscient (as if we can see him from the outside perspectives of those around him) to her own voice, the biographer lets us see the incompleteness of each conflicting image and recognize the persistent unknowns. Likewise, McDonald's choice to structure the story around repeated flashbacks to the Rupal Face rescue makes the book itself reflect the immensity of public attention and debate, of private memory and imagination, and of unanswerable questions and mysteries that whirled around the vortex of one of the most surreal episodes in climbing history--at its time.
Shortly after he returned from the Rupal Face, Humar told Daniel Duane in a National Geographic Adventure interview, "Honestly speaking, it's not a good thing to be an actor in a reality show." By the end of the biography, the reader has to agree with him--but also to recognize that, both in the mountains and at home, virtual reality has increasingly encroached upon the real. Less than a month after Humar's rescue, Steve House and Vince Anderson pulled off a successful, impeccable alpine-style ascent on the Rupal Face. Many considered the simplicity of their climb to be the antithesis of the reality-show atmosphere of Humar's failed attempt. Only three years later, the nature of reporting in the climbing world has changed. Today, even House calls in regular satellite phone reports of his climbs, which are then posted on Patagonia's blog, [.....].
One of the most ambitious and significant portraits of alpine climbing's postmodernity, McDonald's book gives us fleeting windows into a life that has resisted the continuous narrative of traditional biography. Instead we get a series of contrasting moments--reminiscent of well-crafted blog posts and anticipating, perhaps, how the new-media revolution will transform the old. For as strange as the world of Tomaz Humar appears in each of these stories, stranger still is the realization that it is, now, partly our own.
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In August, 2005, Tomaž Humar was trapped on a narrow ledge at 19,000 feet on the formidable Rupal Face of Nanga Parbat. He had been attempting a new route, directly up the middle of the highest mountain face in the world-solo. After six days he was out of food, almost out of fuel, and frequently buried by avalanches. Three helicopters were poised for a brief break in the weather to pluck him off the mountain. Because of the audacity of the climb, the fame of the climber, the high risk associated with the rescue, and the hourly reports posted on his base-camp website, the world was watching. Would this be the most spectacular rescue in climbing history? Or a tragic-and very public-death in the mountains? Years before, as communism was collapsing and the Balkans slid into chaos, Humar was unceremoniously conscripted into a dirty war that he despised, where he observed brutal and inhumane atrocities that disgusted him. Finally he did the unthinkable: he left and eventually arrived home in what had become a new country-Slovenia. He returned to climbing, and within very few years, he was among the best in the world. Reinhold Messner, among others, called him the most remarkable mountain climber of his generation.
