Whether the mountaineers throw crampons into the pit instead of roses at the funeral of the avalanche victim, so that the reverential silence is disturbed by rattling and cracking, or you come across “a backpack with food, energy drink and at least four sets of new crampons” in a rock niche on Monte Rosa – with Erwin Einzinger the unexpected almost always happens and objects, situations and people are put into relation in a new way.
The prose of the Upper Austrian, who celebrates his 70th birthday on May 13, has been praised for its originality, wit and lightness for 40 years, since his debut with “The Frightening about the Silence in which Reality Continued”. The new volume “A backpack full of crampons” with more than 300 pages does not disappoint either. Einzinger’s crampons are climbing aids in both practical and metaphorical terms. They help not to lose his footing when the author leaves every well-trodden path behind and cross-country, often in the direttissima, strives from the lowlands of everyday life to lofty heights, where cheekiness triumphs, the air becomes thin and facts blur with mirages .
It is by no means just alpine prose and mountaineering jargon that Einzinger is dishing up – if only because you can end up in the Carpathians or in the mountains east of Canberra as well as in the Appalachians or Abruzzo, and because squirrel and kangaroo meat are on the table comes and human flesh is only despised for reasons of taste.
The short portions of text, seldom longer than half a page or a whole page, which often already show one or two breaks in themselves, do not form a unit but a conglomerate that, when polished, reveals its porous structure particularly beautifully: thousand individual parts of the most diverse origins and texture held together with the glue of Einzinger’s language.
“A book for long-distance hikers and mountaineers, and for everyone who prefers to follow the spectacle from a reading chair!”, the publisher advertises. The spectacle is that a world experience is suggested that comes from first, second or third hand and still has the same status. Seen in this way, Einzinger’s texts are similar to the Internet in their flood of information – with one major advantage: everything can be considered invented here and can be enjoyed unchecked.
However, there is a bit of melancholy in the air: the terrain on which Einzinger lets his stories take place is changing. The glaciers are melting, the rocks are crumbling, the vegetation looks very different today than it used to. But no matter how close to nature Einzinger’s prose is, nothing can hide the fact that his true object of study is the human being. Approaching it is the pinnacle of fieldwork. In order not to have an accident, you need good equipment. A backpack full of crampons, for example.
(SERVICE – Erwin Einzinger: “A backpack full of crampons”, young and young, 328 pages, 24 euros, reading on April 19, 7 p.m., Literaturhaus Graz)