Best Novels on Skiing?

[summit]

Glad to hear it, @summit. There's a good review in the Dec TAR of Peter Shelton's book as well- am sure you saw that.

OK by "your recommendation" I technically meant BIlly Cyr's recommendation in your publication :-D

[homemadesalsa]

OK by "your recommendation" I technically meant BIlly Cyr's recommendation in your publication :-D

Yes, but I read it too, and loved it. I might have a deeper historical understanding than Billy of Peter's experiences.

Sent from my HTC6535LRA using TGR Forums mobile app

[summit]

Cool! I'll post back when I get around to reading it... lots of crap on my mandatory reading list though

[snoqpass]

Not a novel but still a good book

[dunfree]

When there were the three of us instead of just the two, it was the cold and the weather that finally drove us out of Paris in the winter time. Alone there was no problem when you got used to it. I could always go to a cafe to write and could work all morning over a cafe crem while the waiters cleaned and swept out the cafe and it gradually grew warmer. My could go to work at the piano in a cold place and with enough sweaters keep warm playing and come home to nurse Bumby. It was wrong to take a baby to a cafe in the winter though; even a baby that never cried and watched everything that happen and was never bored. There were no babysitters then and Bumby would stay happy in his tall cage bed with his big, loving cat named F. Puss. There were people who said that it was dangerous to leave with a baby. The most ignorant and prejudiced said that a cat would suck a baby's breath and kill him. Others said that a cat would on a baby and the cat's weight would smother him. F. puss lay beside Bumby in a tall cage bed and watched the door with his big yellow eyes, and would let no one come near him when we were out and Marie the femme de manage, had to be away. There was no need for baby-sitters. F. Puss was the baby-sitter.

But when you are poo, and were were really poor when I had given up all journalism when we came back from CAanda, and could sell no stories at all, it was too rough with a baby in Paris in the winter. AT three months Mr. Bumby had crossed the North ATlantic on a twelve-day small Cunarder that sailed from New York via Halifax in January. H ever cried on that trip and laughed happily when he would be barricaded in a bunk so he could not fall out when we were in heavy weather. But our Paris was too cold for him.

We went to Schruns in the Voralberg in Austria. After going through Switzerland you came to the Austrian frontier at Feldkirch. The train went through Lichtenstein and stopped at Bludenz when there was a small branch line that ran along a pebbly trout river through a valley of farms and forest to SChruns, which was a sunny market town with sawmills, stores, inns and a good, year-around hotel called the Taube where we lived.

[dunfree]

The rooms at the Taube were large and comfortable with big stoves, big windows, and big beds with good blankets and feather coverlets. Teh meals were simple and excellent and the dinging room and the wood-planked public bar were heated and friendly. The valley was wide and open so there was good sun. The pension was about two dollars a day for the three of us, and as the Austrian schilling went down with inflation, our room and food were less all the time. There was no desperate inflation and poverty as there had been in Germany. The schilling went up and down, but its longer course was down.

There were no ski lifts from Schruns and no funiculars, but there were logging trials and cattle trails that led up different mountain valleys to the high mountain country. You climbed on foot carrying your skis and higher up, where the snow as too deep, you climbed on seal skins that you attached to the bottoms of skis. At the tops of mountain valleys there were the big Alpine Club huts for summer climbers where you could sleep and leaver payment for any wood you used. In some you had to pack up your own wood, or if you were going on a long tour in the high mountains and the glaciers, you hired someone to pack wood and supplies up with you, and established a base. The most famous of these high base huts were the LIndauer-Hutte, the Madlnere-Haus and the Wiesbadner-Hutte.

[dunfree]

In back of the Taube there was a sort of practice slope where you ran through orchards and fields and there was another good slope behind Tschagguns across where there was a beautiful inn with an excellent collection of chamois horns on the walls of the drinking room.. It was from behind the lumber village of Tchaagguns, which was on the far edge of the valley, that the good skiing wnet all the way up until you could eventually cross the mountains and get over the Silvretta into the Klosters area.

Schruns was a healthy place for Bumby who had a dark haired beautiful girl to take him out in the sun in his sleigh and look after him, and Hadley and I had all the new country to learn and the new villages, and the people of the town who were very friendly. Herr Walther Lent who was a pioneer highmountain skier and at one time had been a partner with Hannes Schenider, the great Arlberg skier, making ski waxes for climbing and all snow conditions, was starting a school for Alpine skiing and we both enrolled. Walther Lent's system was to get his pupils off the practice slopes as soon as possible and into the high mountains on trips. Skiing was not the way it is now, the spiral fracture had not become common then, and no one could afford a broke leg. There were no ski patrols. Anything you ran down from, you had to climb up. That gave you legs that were fit to run down with.

Walther Lent believed the fun of skiing was to get up into the highest mountain country where there was no one else and where the snow as untracked and then travel from one high Alpine Club hut to another over the top passes and glaciers of the Alps. You must not have a binding that could break your leg if you fell. The ski should come off before it broke your leg. What he really loved was unroped glacier skiing, but for that we had to wait until spring when the crevasses were sufficiently covered.

[Meadow Skipper]

^I love that shit.

[Flyoverland Captive]

[dunfree]

Hadley and I had loved skiing since we had first tried it together in Switzerland and later in Cortina d'Ampezzo in the Dolomites when Bumby was going to be born and the doctor in Milan had given her permission to continue to ski if I would promise she would not fall down. This took a very careful selection of terrain and of runs and absolutely controlled running, but she had beautiful, wonderfully strong legs and fine control of her skis, and she did not fall. We all knew the different snow conditions and everyone knew how to run in deep powder snow.

We l;oved the Voralberg and we loved Schruns. We would go there about Tahnksgiving time and stay until Easter. There was always skiing though Schruns was not high enough for a ski resort except in the a winter of high snow. But climbing was fun and no one minded it in those days. You set a certain pace well under the speed at which you could climb, and it was easy and your heart felt good and you were proud of the weight in your rucksack. Part of the climb up to the Madlener-Haus was steep and very tough. But the second time you made the climb it was easier, and finally you made it easily with double the weight you had carried at first.

[Laps]

^^^makes me want to move to the alps and ski bum professionally.

[Meadow Skipper]

Okay then, one of my favorite Hemingway passages on skiing from TMF:
"The winter of the avalanches was like a happy and innocent winter in childhood compared to the next winter, a nightmare winter disguised as the greatest fun of all, and the murderous summer that was to follow. It was the year the rich showed up."

Sums up my feelings.

[dunfree]

If you don't do it now Laps, you'll be one year older when you do.

This is the last chapter from A Movable Feat, posted as my lazy ass types it, if people didn't get that.

We were always hungry and every meal time was a great event. We drank light or dark beer and new and wines that were a year old sometimes. The white wines were the best. For other drinks there was kirsch made in the valley and ENzian Schnapps distilled from mountain gentian. Sometime for dinner there would be jugged hare with a rich red wine sauce, and sometimes venison with chestnut sauce. We would drink red wine with these even though it was more expensive than white wine, and the very best cost twenty cents per liter. Ordinary red wine was much cheaper and we packed it up in kegs to the Madlener Haus.

We had a store of books that Sylvia Beach had let us take for the winter and we could bowl with the people of the town in the alley that onto the summer garden of the hotel. Once or twice a week there was a poker game in the dining room of the hotel with all the windows shuttered and the door locked. Gambling was forbidden in Austria then and I played with Herr Nels, the hotel keeper, Herr lent of the Alpine Ski school, a banker of the town, the public prosecutor and the captain of the Gendarmerie. It was a stiff game and they were all good poker players except that Herr Lent played too wildly because the ski school was not making any money. The captain of the Gendarmerie would raise his finger to his ear when he would hear the pair of gendarmes stop outside the door when they made their rounds, and we would be silent until they had gone on.

In the cold of the morning as soon as it was light the maid would come into the room and shut the windows and make a fire in the big porcelain stove. Then the room was warm, there was breakfast of fresh bread or toast with delicious fruit preserves and big bowls of coffee, fresh eggs and good ham if you wanted it. There was a dog named Schnauz that on the foot of the bed who loved to go on ski trips and to ride on my back or over my shoulder when I ran down hill. He was Mr. Bumby's friend too and would go for walks with him and his nurse beside the small sleigh.

[dunfree]

Schruns was a good place to work. I know because I did the most difficult job of rewriting I have ever done there in the winter of 1925 and 1926, when I had to take the first draft of The Sun Also Rises which I had written in one sprint o six weeks, and make it into a novel. I cannot remember what stories I wrote there. There were several though that turned out well.

I remember the snow on the road to the village squeaking at night when we walked home in the cold with our skis and ski poles on our shoulders, watching the lights and then finally seeing the buildings, and how everyone on the road said Gruss Gott. There were always country men in the Weinstube with nailed boots and mountain clothes and the air was smoky and the wooden floors scarred by the nails. Many of the young men had served in the Austrian Alpine regiments and one named Hans, who worked in the sawmill, was a famous hunter and we were good friends because we had been in the same part of the mountains in Italy. We drank together and we all sang mountain songs.

I remember the trails up through the orchards and the fields of the hillside farms above the village and the warm farm houses with their great stoves and the huge wood piles in the snow. The women worked in the kitchens carding and spinning wool into gray and black yarn. The spinning wheels worked by a foot treadle and the yarn was not dyed. The black yarn was from the wool of black sheep. The wool was natural and the fat had not been removed, and the caps and sweaters and long scarves that Hadley knitted from it never became wet with snow.

[Mulletizer]

The Ski Bum by Romain Gary. An excellent piece of 1960s literature that captures the essence of skiing. Seek it out.

[Super G]

Breaking Even--Dick Barrymore

[ptavv]

40+ replies and no one has mentioned James Salter's Solo Faces? For shame.

It was even made into the movie Downhill Racer, staring Robert Redford

[The Amicable Snowman]

Solo Faces is excellent. I would put that in one holster and God of Skiing in the other and feel well-armed for literary stoke showdowns.

That said, Solo Faces is much more to do with climbing. It is excellent.

The Downhill Racer, film, was adapted by Salter from a book of the same name by Oakley Hall. I have not read the book; did not love the movie in spite of wanting to.

Sent from my iPhone using TGR Forums

[ptavv]

Well there you go. I read the book years before I saw the movie, had always connected them because of Salter. Cool to know there's more to it.

[Laps]

[QUOTE=dunfree ;5217332]If you don't do it now Laps, you'll be one year older when you do.

I don't care how old I am when I do it, as long as I do it.

[WhiskeyTangoFoxtrot]

White Planet by Leslie Anthony: a humorous tale of global ski culture

and yes, im spancered .......

[SKIP IN7RO]

Definitely not the best, but a good read. In Search Of Powder by Jeremy Evans. It has some TGR stuff in it too.

[snoqpass]

The Avalanche Hunters by Montgomery Atwater, the man was a pioneer in avalanche forecasting an control



The White Cascade by Gary Krist, not exactly skiing but good reading


The Ski Book

[SKIP IN7RO]

^That is a tough book to find at a reasonable price. I hope to someday find a copy at the thrift store.

[snoqpass]

There’s some cheap ones over at Amazon