Summary of To the Vertigo (2013)
A woman with frosted hair bursts into the shelter, close to faint. The guard runs to help her. He takes her to a bedroom, he gently removes her clothes, like a surgeon, and begins to apply all types of care. While trying to revive her, he falls in love with her, even before he realizes that she is Irena Besikova, a legend among professional climbers.
To the Vertigo is a story about a great love, an unusual triangle and an enigmatic and lonely female climber. Irena’s decision to stay as a guide on the Tammarians’s mountain range causes one avalanche after another. The passions lead the protagonists to the very edge of insanity. The vertigo of amorous attraction competes against mountaineering. The wilderness disagrees with the urban civilization. Will they run the risk to lose family and professional comfort for a crazy thing? The devotions are incompatible. And especially when they are idealistic and extreme. Despite the obstacles, climbing and complicated conquests advance stage by stage.
Written in intense and elegant prose, To the Vertigo is a romance novel, plenty of landscape and adventure. The work raises two major debates: the one of passion and the feminism. It is also a tribute to the mountains where the characters, drawn by uncontrollable urges, merge into real climbers. To the Vertigo is a stunning and overwhelming literary mountain that attracts us to the summit, tirelessly and without even realizing it.
For a normal reader To the Vertigo will be a love story, a story of a destructive passion. Good readers will realize, at the end of the book, the metaliterary dimension and the importance of words and imagination. And they should decide what has been real and what has been not. To the Vertigo means the vertigo of the mountain, the passion of love, the love of arts and of any drug that possesses us and makes us obsessively crave for it. For a climber, the most important are the summits. For a lover, his love. For an artist, his art.
The author of the picture of the book published by Empúries is the reputed photographer Jimmy Chin, a mountaineer and a regular contributor to National Geographic.
The female climber is Kate Rutherford ascending Freestone wall in solo style with Upper Yosemite Falls in the background, in the natural park of Yosemite in California.
