The Beckoning Silence
by Joe Simpson
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Book Summary Information
Author: Joe SimpsonEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2003-06
ISBN: 0898869412
Number of pages: 315
Publisher: Mountaineers Books
Book Reviews of The Beckoning Silence
Book Review: The film was better
Summary: 3 Stars
I saw the documentary entitled "The Beckoning Silence" on a transatlantic flight and was so overawed by its beauty, its understated sense of drama and Simpson's captivating interviews that, when the film was done, I simply went back to the beginning and watched it again. On my return flight I watched the film a third time. Like Simpson I too had read "The White Spider" as a teen and it seems we were both mesmerized by the story of Hinterstoisser's desperate attempt to lead the climb down the Eiger.
I suppose I hoped that Simpson's book would be a chance to relive the film a fourth time and I've been disappointed. On film the man is a charismatic, thoughtful and fascinating interviewee and you truly get a sense of his inner turmoil about climbing. I'd previously read "Touching The Void" and found his writing-style uninspired so, having seen him talk with such passion on film, I was hopeful that this volume would reflect my new respect for the man. Didn't happen.
So: the book is a collection of climbing stories - many of them involving tragic ends - written in the familiar Simpson style. But the film? Now there's another story! Catch it if you can.
Summary of The Beckoning Silence
"I had to stand there and watch while the rest of my life was determined by the shaky adhesion of a few millimetres of fractured ice and the dubious friction of a tiny point of metal in a hairline crack in a rock wall."Marking the climax of his climbing career, Joe Simpson confronts his fears and mountaineering history in an assault on the North Face of the Eiger. Since his epic battle for survival in the Andes, recounted in Touching the Void, Joe Simpson has experienced a life filled with adventure but marred by death. He has endured the painful attrition of climbing friends in accidents which call into question the perilously exhilarating activity to which he has devoted his whole life. Probability is inexorably closing in. The tragic loss of a close friend forces a momentous decision. It is time to turn his back on the mountains that he has loved. Never more alive than when most at risk, he has come to see a last climb on the mile-high North Face of the Eiger as the cathartic finale to his climbing career.
In a narrative that takes the reader through extreme experiences from an avalanche in Bolivia, ice-climbing in the Alps and Colorado and paragliding in Spain - before his final confrontation with the Eiger - Simpson reveals the inner truth of climbing, exploring the power of the mind and the frailties of the body through intensely lived accounts of exhilaration and despair. The subject of his new book is the siren song of fear and his struggle to come to terms with it.
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