Two Sherpas

by Sebastián Martínez Daniell, Jennifer Croft (Translator)

Overview

Mount Everest, and all it means to royalty, explorers, imperialists, and two sherpas, perched on a cliffside, waiting for a man on the ledge below to move.

A British climber has fallen from a cliffside in Nepal, and lies inert on a ledge below. Two sherpas kneel at the edge, stand, exchange the odd word, waiting for him to move, to make a decision, to descend. In those minutes, the world opens up to Kathmandu, a sun-bleached beach town on another continent, and the pages of Julius Caesar. Mountaineering, colonialism, obligation—in Sebastián Martínez Daniell's effortless prose each breath is crystalline, and the whole world is visible from here.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781913867423
Publisher:	Charco Press
Publication date:	02/28/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	271
File size:	596 KB

About the Author

Sebastián Martínez Daniell was born in Buenos Aires in 1971. He has published three novels, Semana (Week, 2004), Precipitaciones aisladas (Isolated Showers, 2010) and Dos Sherpas (Two Sherpas, 2018). His work has also been included in anthologies such as Buenos Aires / Escala 1:1 (2007), Uno a uno (2008), Hablar de mí (2010) and Golpes . Relatos y memorias de la dictadura (2016). He is one of the co-founders of the independent publisher Entropía and is a literature lecturer at the National University of the Arts in Buenos Aires.

Jennifer Croft won a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship for her novel The Extinction of Irena Rey , the 2020 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for her illustrated memoir Homesick and the 2018 International Booker Prize for her translation from Polish of Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights. She holds an MFA from the University of Iowa and a PhD from Northwestern University and is a Presidential Professor at the University of Tulsa.

Editorial Reviews

★ 2023-01-12
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 Martínez 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. Martínez 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, Martínez 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.

Kirkus Reviews

"Daniell reveals a fascinating universe in scintillating prose, precisely translated by Croft….It’s a stunner." —Publishers Weekly, starred review

"An ambitiously inventive, profoundly intelligent trek through highly personal experiences of lingering imperialism." —Kirkus, starred review

"Brilliantly tangential...this book becomes a viewpoint from which we can see the whole world." —The Observer

"Daniell uses a neat cast of characters, a sprinkling of sub-tales and a touch of comedy to create a story far broader than the reader might expect, an acerbic dissection of a tired world order and personal history of two very different individuals." —Lunate

"Two Sherpas is sheer brilliance, a book that had me hooked in anticipation from its opening pages. It’s a wake up call." —Word by Word

**********
Praise for Sebastián Martínez Daniell

"Daniell reveals a fascinating universe in scintillating prose, precisely translated by Croft….It’s a stunner." —Publishers Weekly, starred review

"An ambitiously inventive, profoundly intelligent trek through highly personal experiences of lingering imperialism." —Kirkus, starred review

"Brilliantly tangential...this book becomes a viewpoint from which we can see the whole world." —The Observer

From the Publisher