Out Now: Altitude by Jean-Marc Rochette and Olivier Bocquet
From the co-creator of Snowpiercer, Altitude offers an exhilarating, autobiographical account of writer and artist Jean-Marc Rochette’s early life as a mountain climber.
Personally, I’d put this on par with James Salter’s Solo Faces. It’s at least as well-informed about the alternately, even sometimes simultaneously exalting and harrowing young man’s game that is sport mountaineering, without the breathless, relentless glorification and mythologizing that Salter’s prose tends to effortlessly confer. It offers a fascinating glimpse into artist Rochette’s formative years, a good cross-section of a confusing time of life, but also a sport subculture in a specific era:. Climbers are bound by an unspoken code in a tenuous community whose members are always coming and going without ceremony or warning.
I once translated some stories by writer Sylvain Jouty (in Asimov’s and Alpinist), who before settling down to a more sedentary life was for a long time an avid mountaineer, then the editor of L’Alpinisme et randonnée. The summer we were married, my wife and I stayed at his incredible house (and B&B) one night, and over dinner, he remarked on how relieved he was that his sons had never shown much interest in climbing. It spared him from having to talk them out of it. I asked him why he himself had quit climbing. Jouty replied, “After a while, everyone you know is wounded or dead.”
Those words came back to me forcefully about two-thirds of the way through translating this book, which accumulates a surprising amount of tension, even dread, just from my waiting, as a reader, for the other shoe to drop: for youthful enthusiasm to turn, on a dime, to folly. After a while, all the characters start getting wounded or dying, and the book starts to really hurt. You wonder just who is going to survive this unsentimental chronicle. In fact, [SPOILER ALERT] Rochette lucks out of several scrapes that could have been much worse only to be permanently disfigured by a freak accident. Are there no happy endings in mountaineering?
Olivier Bocquet
is definitely a writer to watch. Above are some other titles of his I’ve translated.
The first is his Eisner-nominated reboot of the French classic Fantomas. It’s fairly faithful in spirit but picks and chooses events from the first three novels. It returns menace and grandeur to a foundational pulp villain, who over the decades has become something of an anti-hero when not an outright camp figure. Julie Rocheleau is an artist who seems to reinvent herself with every book, to equally dazzling results, and her Belle Epoque stylings here enhance the story’s fever-dream atmosphere. This book also succeeds in making it clear again why the Surrealists were so fascinated by Fantomas.
FRNK is the story of an orphan who travels back to prehistoric times. Hijinks both comic and life-threatening ensue. I have to admit, when I first started the series, I thought it was just another fairly disposable kids’ comic. But as the mystery of time travel deepens and the story becomes more layered, the characters have really grown on me, and I found the end of the first five-book arc very moving. I just finished translating the sixth volume, which takes a wholly new tack to adding new characters and resetting the story. I have no idea where Bocquet is headed with all this, but he’s got me fully along for the ride now.
