'High' by Erika Fatland
Norway’s Erika Fatland is among the great contemporary travel writers. Her novelist’s eye for telling detail is apparent on many pages of High, her account of journeying across many borders through the Himalayan mountains. “It was raining heavily and the ground was slick and muddy, the car skidded, but the driver kept his eyes on the road and his foot on the accelerator.”
She describes the scenery with clarity but is most interested in the people she encounters and the situations of their lives. The Muslim Uighurs of western China live under an oppressive, Orwellian surveillance state; one in 10 are imprisoned in “reeducation centers.” A Shia Muslim she encounters in disputed Kashmir is happy to live on the Indian side of the line for fear of Pakistan’s militant Sunni Muslims, even if India’s ruling Hindu nationalists have fanned intolerance of Muslims.
The Himalayan mountains, she concludes, are no more permanent than anything else, and change is coming rapidly as the Earth warms, the “eternal snow” melts and the glaciers thaw “at an ever quickening rate.” High is beautifully written reporting from a region threatened not only on all sides from within.
