TWO SHERPAS

"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.