A classic, and up to the end of Harrer's own ascent, excellent and gripping. The rest of the book, detailing the further history of the face from an observer's perspective gets a bit dull (hence 3 stars overall). ( )

I enjoyed reading The White Spider, because I, too, love mountains, though I have never had the agility to begin to think about climbing them. Later, my school was one of the first state schools to offer "outdoor pursuits" as an option, and the woman mountaineer Alison Hargreaves was just a couple of years below me, and got her love of mountains from my school and the climbing experiences it offered. It was to lead to her death on K2 in 1996; but as The White Spider sets out unequivocally, those who go to climb mountains accept the danger; it literally goes with the territory. You might say that it wouldn't be possible to climb mountains without embracing the risk.

An old mountain man recommended this book to me many years ago, and I have been looking for a copy ever since. Well, now I have one and I have read it. It is very much one of those books that reveal a whole world unknown to the ordinary person in the street; Harrer reels off a litany of names of great mountaineers whose names mean little to those who have not shared the glory and the terror of doing one-on-one combat with the high places of this world. Only as we get into the last part of his narrative, with the advent of some British climbers, do names like Chris Bonington and Dougal Haston ring a bell with the British reader.

The White Spider has the benefit of being written by someone who is deeply connected with the hills, who lived for them all his life, and was prepared to do anything so that he could indulge his passion for climbing. Heinrich Harrer was one of the first team to successfully scale the North Face of the Eiger in 1938. And that involved getting very close to some political figures of the time who are now considered well beyond the pale. Only by ending up in Tibet and developing a close personal friendship with the Dalai Lama was Harrer able to come to some sort of reconciliation with his past. Whether others can do that is going to be a very personal matter.

Nonetheless, this is the definitive book on the story of the North Face of the Eiger up to the early 1960s, written with the authority of one who was there. The book dates from 1959, with extra chapters added in 1965, and it shows. Harrer goes on at length about the nobility, comradeship and fraternity of those who climb. (I chose the word 'fraternity' carefully. The first woman climber made her successful ascent in 1964; Harrer's treatment of this has an air of condescension about it.) He also does not hold back on the horror of the deaths of those who perished on the North Face, without becoming graphic (and this is all the more horrible for it). This is also emphasised by his stilted writing style, though it should be noted that a lot of that is down to the translator, who translated it into equally stilted English. Other reviewers have commented on the ellipses; this is actually a fairly accurate rendition of an Austrian style of conversation, and some of the circumlocations in the text are equally typically Austrian. A new translation in conjunction with a decent editor would solve these problems.

There is one fly in the ointment; the 1957 dual ascent and the one climber out of four who survived it, the Italian Claudio Corti. That August, two teams made simultaneous attempts on the North Face, a German and an Italian one. When Corti was injured in a rock fall, his partner, Stephano Longhi, left him in a bivouac below the summit to await rescue whilst Longhi attempted to continue to the summit as conditions were so poor that retreat was impossible - the only way off the hill was via the summit and then via a (comparatively) easy descent route. Longhi then fell from a ledge higher up the face, and was unable to get off the mountain, perishing from the cold. Corti, meanwhile, had passed his climbing equipment on to the other team on the mountain, the Germans Gunther Nothdurft and Franz Meyer. They made the summit, but then fell to their deaths on the descent; their bodies were not found for four years.

Corti was rescued in a pioneering effort by the local guides; but afterwards made some ill-judged statements to the press through a highly unreliable narrator who claimed to be acting in his best interests but who actually wanted a sensational story. Gossip and wild accusations followed, and multiplied; and in writing this story down, Harrer seems to have sided with the mob rather than the mountaineer, engaging in some serious character assassination of both the Italian climbers and (writing before their bodies were discovered) making veiled accusations that Corti was somehow implicated in the deaths of the two German climbers. Even when Nothdurft and Meyer's bodies were recovered, with proof that they had achieved the summit and that Corti was in no way responsible for their deaths, Harrer would not recant. It was almost as though, having surrendered to the elements and having waited passively for rescue, Corti had somehow broken the unwritten code of the mountains that Harrer had spent the entire book building up. The link will take you to an examination of Corti's life after the North Face, written by Luco Signorelli in 2010 on the occasion of Corti's death at the age of 81: https://www.ukclimbing.com/articles/features/claudio_corti_a_life_in_the_shadow_...

The other problem with this book is the packaging. Behind this (2005) edition's graphics-savvy cover, there's a 1959 book lurking within. There are regular footnotes that either talk about the fates of some of the climbers named, or refer the reader back some pages to an account of some other climb; these are completely superfluous. There is one graphic showing the North Face, and a handful of black-and-white photographs, including a three-page one showing the North Face and annotated with some of the places mentioned in the text. But only some of them. This book is crying out for a proper re-packaging, with modern graphics and a better selection of photographs. (Some of the historic views in this edition should be retained but could use some serious digital retouching.) A repackaging would also enable the footnotes to be replaced with a biographical appendix of climbers mentioned in the text, with their histories, especially (for those who survived) their climbing histories after 1965. This 2005 edition has a section at the back of the book with an interview, a timeline of Harrer and a short article by him; this is in the spirit of the extras on a DVD but they are really tacked on the end and don't feel integrated with the rest of the book. The sort of repackaging I have in mind would need to go much further.

Whilst reading this, I watched Clint Eastwood's 1975 thriller The Eiger Sanction. I was amused to see the climbers in the film use the same annotated photographs of the North Face to plan their own route; and many of the events of some of the early climbs were reflected in the action of the film, including the Hinterstoisser Traverse and the death of Toni Kurtz in 1936. I suspect Eastwood read this book when the film was in development, as the coincidences seem too close to be accidental.

Despite all these criticisms, I enjoyed The White Spider; but that was despite the physical book's many drawbacks. ( )

Heinrich Harrer's own account of the unsuccessful attempts to climb the North face of the Eiger mountain in Switzerland and his own successful one provide excellent drama told by an expert. The subsequent climbs of the North face are less interesting to read. Harrer naturally scrubbed all parts of his Nazi past from the story. Why and from whom they received generous support in Germany is not mentioned, neither that he carried a Nazi flag to the top nor that he afterwards had a personal meeting with Hitler nor that he was an early Nazi when this was still illegal in Austria. Some say he personally took part in destroying the synagogue of Graz.

His passion for mountaineering, however, spared him from getting involved too deep as he was in India on the way to Nepal when the Second World War broke out and interned by the British there. In the camps, he is said to have remained a staunch Nazi who also escaped and recaptured a number of times while trying to march out of India to join the Japanese - a futile endeavor. He managed to get to Tibet, though - which became the story for the bestseller "Seven Years in Tibet" and his re-definition as an explorer and adventurer post WWII.

A good read that needs a thorough introduction. ( )

While I have never understood the motivation of people who willingly place themselves in harm's way by doing all sorts of bizarre things like hanging from ropes above precipices
with rocks falling on their heads and winter blizzards forcing snow down their necks, I must admit they make fascinating reading.

The Eiger, a particularly nasty rock face, was not successfully climbed from the north until the author and his team succeeded (where many others had failed) in 1938. This astonishing book is the saga of the many who failed and the
few who succeeded. Even today, with modern equipment, the north face of the Eiger represents an extraordinary challenge to even the best climbers. I must say, however, that Harrer is oftentimes defensive, rarely attributing anything but the best of motives to the climbers.
Surely, some of them must have been climbing for the glory. Perhaps the most tragic of all the climbs was that, in 1936, of four climbers, two of whom were Mountain Rangers (the call from their commanding officer forbidding the attempt came after they had already left) who had made quite good progress until one of them was hit by a falling rock — a constant source of danger — and his colleagues decided to attempt a return down the face. They all perished on the return trip. What happened is not entirely clear. Harrer speculates that the most experienced of the four fell while trying to traverse back across a sheer face to install some pitons to make the way for the rest. They had hauled up their lines behind them, a necessity evidently to get across this particularly bad section. His fall dragged the injured
man down with him and killed one of the others. The fourth man was left hanging 300 feet in the air, almost above the Jungfrau railway station that carries tourists up through the mountain to a ski resort on the other side. Even though
alpine guide policy was to never attempt a rescue because of the danger — something helicopters managed to do only many years later — several guides tried to help. Despite a
truly heroic attempt to splice together two ropes,
a difficult task with two warm hands, the remaining
climber, Toni Kurz, had only one free hand, was dangling in the air, and was almost frozen stiff. He might have made it, except that a knot became jammed in one of the snap rings that it traveled through and he lacked the energy to
free it. His would-be rescuers heard him plead for help through most of the night before he died.

After a while, the litany of cold, rock falls, and Harrer's unrelentingly hagiographic description of mountaineers wears a little thin. Only the Italian Claudio Corti comes in for some oblique criticism. He was attempting to climb the face
with an older climber, another Italian. They clearly had not prepared and, after a false start that consumed several days, met up with two German climbers (who completed the climb of the face and died on the way down the west
side) who went with them for some distance despite a language barrier. The Germans gave Corti their tent following a fall by Corti's partner whom he was not able to save and who died several days later hanging from a rope, despite tremendous efforts to save him. Corti himself was
rescued only by winching a guide down from the summit on a steel cable. The guide then carried Corti on his back the remaining thousand feet up the face. Corti's confused and contradictory account of what had happened and where the Germans were — they had disappeared and their bodies
were not located until several years later — made skeptics of many in the mountaineering community.

The Germans' loan of their equipment to Corti probably sealed their doom. Harrer includes a route map of the face for those idiots willing to contemplate such an adventure.
All sorts of security measures and new equipment have come on the market since Harrer's successful climb, but in spite of these new advantages, "the North Wall of the Eiger remains one of the most perilous in the Alps." Other climbs may be more difficult technically, "but nowhere else is
there such appalling danger from the purely fortuitous hazards of avalanches, stone falls, and sudden deterioration of the weather as on the Eiger." ( )

A quick read, though unsatisfying either due to Harrer's wooden and often hackneyed prose or the translation, maybe both. (What's with all the ellipses?) The book is weighted down with a bizarre defensiveness. What would be most interesting-- the texture of life on the mountain face-- is left out completely, replaced with logistic discussions which become repetitive. Though, I suppose in wanting the vicariousness of a sensory narrative I'm one of the "rubberneckers" he seems to have such disdain for.

Being a brave adventurer doesn't exactly make one a natural storyteller- this book is proof of that.

Also, the passages on the women climbers are deeply sexist, which sealed my dislike. ( )