Customer Reviews

In The Suicide Mountains

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This is a great book, sadly hard to find, and a lovely fable, gracefully told. If you can find a copy, buy it, and read it when you need perspective. I can't say the writing is particularly luminous, but it is about what is true, and who we want to be, and who we become. Its one of the few books I keep extras of to give away.

During the course of this winsome and lively fantasy novella, the mysterious Abbot of the Ancient Monastery, unbidden, entertains his despondent guests with three adaptations of Russian tales. After the first story, Prince Christopher (who really doesn't want to be a prince, much less the king) says, "It's an interesting tale. Yet one thing I don't understand, father." "Yes?" responds the abbot.

"I don't understand why you've told it to us."

"Ah, that," replies the abbot.

Throughout his career, Gardner wrestled with this very issue, seeking the answer to the question so often asked by readers: "What's the point of the story?" During the mid-1970s, he published several books of fairy tales for children (such as "Dragon, Dragon") and surreal Gothic stories for adults (including "The King's Indian"), as well as "In the Suicide Mountains." As he said in an interview soon after the book's publication, he "was constantly playing literature against life, looking for the answers literature gives, or so we're told." Gardner constantly tried to identify "Ah, that"--the happy medium between the lecture and the poem, between spelling out the moral of the story and letting readers interpret it for themselves.

In the main story of "In the Suicide Mountains," we meet Chudu, a 200-year-old shape-shifter despised by his neighbors and blamed for every misfortune or tragedy in the vicinity; Armida, the beautiful Cinderella-like prisoner of her domineering stepmother; and Christopher, the un-heroic prince who likes playing the violin and reading poetry. To make him less "feminine," the king has given his son the impossible task of finding and killing the villainous Six-Fingered Man--but once all three travelers meet up, they discover that each of them have something in common: they have lost the urge to live.

Beautifully illustrated with black-and-white drawings by Joe Servello, the book can be read and enjoyed--assuming you can get your hands on a copy--by any child and teenager old enough to read "Harry Potter," as well as by adults with an interest in medieval literature, folk tales, fantasy, and metafiction. (Considering the current popularity of books featuring dwarfs, dragons, shape-shifters, magic, and the like, this book seems a likely candidate for a publisher to reprint.) With a pitch-perfect combination of light morbidity and whimsical humor, Gardner guides his three heroes through episodes that display how "life follows art"; the trio find self-worth both through storytelling and through the adventures they reluctantly confront. There is plenty of "Ah, that" to be found in this short novel, but above all Gardner confronts the issue of suicide and offers the answer that, often unexpectedly, life offers reasons to live to even the most despondent among us, if we just leave ourselves open to its possibilities.

An okay read, nothing great. Gardner once said of himself, "I am the greatest writer since Chaucer." Gardner died in the 1980's and most of his books are now out of print. Chaucer died in the 1300's and we're still reading THE CANTERBURY TALES. Gardner hasn't really lived up to Chaucer, has he?