Until the late 18th century, before they became objects of conquest, Switzerland’s mountains were considered just “a landscape backdrop, distant and best left alone”, Claire Thomas writes in her latest book, On Not Climbing Mountains. The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau was particularly to blame for the shift, reframing the mountains as “a site of spiritual sustenance and potential enlightenment … the people arrived, and started to climb, and they have been climbing ever since.”
On Not Climbing Mountains is a novel, but it draws from and references a great deal of actual historical and literary sources, and is told in a curiously impersonal tone. We follow Beatrice, our solitary narrator, as she journeys by train through Switzerland, her father’s birthplace, all the while longing to be “beside the point, outside time, somehow untethered to the measurable”.
