How do you describe a mountain – something too big to look at all in one go? Do you focus on the peaks and crags, the way it drops off only to pick up somewhere else? Or on lines and shadows stretching messily across the landscape over which it towers? Perhaps it’s not about the mountain itself, but the life systems it supports, the birds, mammals, humans that make their home in its folds. Maybe the only real way to think about a mountain is in shuffled pieces that take on a different appearance with every glimpse, just as a mountain changes depending on the angle or the season you’re observing it from.

So we encounter Mountainish by Zsuzsannah Gahse, newly translated by Katy Derbyshire. Winner of the 2019 Swiss Grand Prix for Literature, it’s the first of Gahse’s books to be translated into English. Mountainish is a fitting title: as the unnamed narrator and her dog walk different mountain paths with different friends, staying in different towns around the Swiss Alps, her focus meanders. She can’t look at the summit, or think about summiting, because it makes her feel scared and nauseous. She struggles to return to places that she stayed previously. She wants company but shies from it. Over 515 notes, Gahse’s tone is both detached and yet deeply emotive as she explores how mountains make us feel.

Gahse’s gaze drifts to theories about language, etymology, as well as broader philosophical and experiential musings that she revisits and reconstitutes throughout the book:

‘The Pyrenees are audacious, the Alps are European and hence central, often harsh and stuck-up. The Carpathians are not only rich in forest, though they are, and treacherous, including from a political point of view, as it turns out. Above all, however, they are prepared, something I cannot explain in detail, and like all mountain ranges they are constantly changing, so it is pointless to set their description in stone. […] and one should never annoy the Altai.’

Here, the narrator attempts to characterise various mountain ranges and then diverts away from her efforts, as though recognising the folly of her own mission. Starting off authoritative and then wandering into uncertainty, she arrives back at authority with an added dash of humour and levity – a recognition that hers is an impossible task and yet, that she will finish exactly what she started. This is the essence of Mountainish, theories put forward and refined further down the page, as though thought through in real time. The narrator doesn’t want to be proven right or wrong, she just wants to look around, to consider things from different angles, like the mountains that ostensibly form her main subject.

With Mountainish, Gahse is necessarily brought into conversation with writers like Nan Shepherd. Shephard’s landmark work The Living Mountain focussed on the Scottish Cairngorms and presented an entirely different way of looking at and thinking about mountains – as something mystical and alive – to constantly reacquaint oneself with, introducing yourself to it as to a forgetful relative. In his 2011 introduction, Robert Macfarlane acknowledges that what separates Shepherd from contemporaneous mountaineering literature written by men is its refusal to focus on the summit: ‘to aim for the highest point is not the only way to climb a mountain, nor is a narrative of siege and assault the only way to write one.’ He distinguishes between mountaineering literature and mountain literature—the latter which Gahse also falls into, which can be described as a literature centring on the mountain and not our conquering of it, thinking about the harmony or discord between human and landscape, where we fit and where we don’t, and why that might be.

What is striking about this kind of mountain literature is the way it eschews the scientific and the supposedly objective, indeed Gahse is not focussed on mountains as an isolated ‘natural object’. Instead she recognises the subjectivity of her narrator in relation to the mountain. Mountainish is revealed not merely as fitting title, but a perfect one as Gahse’s nameless narrator weaves the fragmented narrative from mountain to mountain until they become more than mountains: rather external imprints of her narrator's inner life. In a moment of metatextual revelation, she writes that 'notes not possible to translate are unusable, and from my point of view anything untranslatable is as terrifying as the impassable regions in the Alps.' Language becomes as insurmountable as alpine paths and vice versa, melding the ‘human’ with the ‘natural’. Experience for Gahse's narrator transforms into a language in and of itself, a way for people to read mountains and for mountains to be read into people. It recalls Shepherd's note that enough movement on the mountain lets her 'walk out of the body and into the mountain'.

In this context, Gahse’s work becomes firmly a part of a larger ecosystem of mountain literature, work that examines mountains piece by piece. It’s not that these works are unable to look at mountains directly, but that looking at them in detail, or by squinting, blurring certain aspects together, they’re able to discover things that are surprising and revelatory about our relationship with the Earth. As Shepherd says, ‘the thing to be known grows with the knowing’, indicating that our mission of discovery and questioning is never complete. Similarly, by the end of Mountainish’s 515 passages, we are no clearer on the topography of the Swiss Alps, but we have gained something of an insight into how they present to her, how she navigates them, and how she feels about mountains in general.

Ultimately, Gahse, like Shepherd, blurs the boundary between the human and non-human in delightfully discursive ways that remind us that often the digression is just as important as the ending.