"It was a world both dazzling and menacing; the eye was lost in its immensities."

Annapurna was recommended to me by the ever-wonderful @amalgama, after they saw me reading and loving Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer. and apparently, this is a very fundamental book in the subgenre "I'M GOING TO GO CLIMB A MOUNTAIN! OH FUCK, THE HORRORS ARE HAPPENING TO ME!" genre (which is quickly becoming a favorite of mine). the ebook i borrowed from the library even has a... digital sticker on the cover of the book (???) telling me it's a bestseller! evidently, a lot of people have read this since it was published!

honestly, it was fun to read an older book (Annapurna was published in the early 1950s) for the first time in a long while. the prose wasn't particularly difficult to understand, but the book was slow-paced, and it felt like i was making my brain run on a treadmill while reading it. which was awesome! my brain needed that run! felt different from reading something published within the past 10 or so years, and made me want to read more older books. admittedly i did struggle with the slow pacing at times (do i really need to know all the minutiae of what these men brought on various points of their trip? no, probably not). but again, brain treadmill! and the slow pacing was worth it to reach the point where Herzog actually (finally, dear god. it takes a while to reach this point) summits Annapurna. he writes beautifully about it: "Never had I felt happiness like this--so intense and yet so pure. That brown rock, the highest of them all, that ridge of ice--were these the goals of a lifetime? Or were they, rather, the limits of man's pride?"

unfortunately: when you read a book from the 1950s, written by a white man, you run a high chance of also getting 1950s-era racism. and this book had... a lot of that! Herzog at least does the bare minimum of acknowledging that he would not be able to make it up Annapurna without the work of the Sherpas, but he's truly the type to say that he cannot believe his countrymen would believe that the people of Nepal are primitives, then turn right around and wonder about if the villagers (who appear to help him, no less!) are cannibals. fuck that. he sounds like the missionaries i had to read books by/about when i was younger (#homeschooledunfortunately) who achieved the truly inglorious one-two punch of exoticizing the people they lived among AND reaching levels of condescending no one could possibly dream of. on the humorous side, Herzog describes the group he climbed Annapurna with as having "diverse backgrounds", and i just had to start laughing at that point. you're all white cis men from France, the most unique thing among you is that one of you was gasp born in a beach town, the hell do you mean "diverse"?

(i typed that sentence and my brain immediately supplied me with the line "Edward Teach, born on a beach" from Our Flag Means Death. god, i love OFMD)

Maurice Herzog apparently kicked the bucket on my 7th birthday, which is now an extremely weird fact i know that will only ever be relevant in this specific context.

The Unworthy (español: Las Indignas) is the first book I’ve read by Bazterrica, and I now want to read everything she’s ever written… but with some space between them because this was heavy. 5 stars because I feel like this book got inside my head and under my skin and horrified me more than any other horror book I’ve read. (And based on what little I know about Tender is the Flesh, I have a feeling that one’s going to be even more unsettling to read…)

Where do I even start to review this?!

The Prose: oh my gods the prose. I have never felt so grateful for my years spent learning Spanish, because reading this book in its original language was a truly stunning experience. I’ve read very few books in Spanish, but this has absolutely been my favorite Spanish-language reading experience so far. I did reference the English translation frequently for some clarification, and then often found that I needed to look up words that were new to me in English as well. While the translator did such a great job at capturing the beauty and nuance of Bazterrica’s language choices, there is a specific rhythmic and poetic quality to the original Spanish that I’m not sure could ever be 100% replicated in English, because the language just doesn’t have the same phonetic structure. The flow of the prose is so lyrical and compelling, and I regularly found myself feeling a much greater emotional impact in the original Spanish than in the English.

The Horror: and again oh my gods, the horror of this was so extremely unsettling for me. Honestly 5 stars just for the power this book held of making me feel immensely uncomfortable. Starting with cockroaches on the first page had me immediately living my actual nightmares (I do have a bit of a roach phobia), and things really only got more horrifying from there. I saw a video on IG where Bazterrica said that she is inspired by things she sees in reality that she then carries out to an extreme, and that is what makes this kind of horror so terrifying to me: it feels like the logical next step to the realities that are already surrounding us. I had visceral physical reactions to this book.

The Beauty: Also in an IG video, I saw Bazterrica say that she writes about not only the cosas horrorosas (horrible things) that humanity is capable of but also the cosas maravillosas (marvelous or wonderful things), and the few moments of beauty and marvel that we get in this novel are that much more stark and striking in their backdrop against such utter darkness and despair.

The Pain: It’s rare that a book makes me actually cry while reading it, and this one did. One particularly painful plot point makes me feel like I’ll tear up just remembering it. Absolutely heart-wrenching. Any book that actually makes me cry gets extra points just for being that emotionally moving.

The Sapphic Yearning: So intensely beautifully done. All the dark beautiful heartbreaking vibes I could ever want. Sapphic love being the light and joy in an otherwise bleak existence. Don’t make me cry again 😭

The Plot/Length/Ending: I’ve seen other reviewers criticize this as too short, ending too abruptly, etc. Personally, I felt like the length was perfect. This novel feels purposefully short, because I think it’s meant to leave you questioning and haunted - Bazterrica doesn’t want to spell out answers for you, and she’s not going to give us as readers the full-out worldbuilding and lore we’re craving. The ending did feel a wee bit rushed, but I felt like it fit with the tone and urgency that was established throughout. Any more exposition and I think this novel would have lost its power.

I really did not expect this book to be so highly-rated for me but just wow - it really got to me in a surprising way. I read this as an ebook, but I would love to own a physical copy now. Bazterrica, you brilliant, terrifying mind - thank you for sharing your genius with the world. 😭

I found a lot of information in here genuinely useful but I wish the book had been formatted a bit differently - I think sections for parents vs teachers might have gone a long way in some of the later chapters, plus I couldn't stand the first person narration from two different authors that didn't differentiate between them when sharing personal stories, and the plugging of their website got annoying fast.

But a lot of the core content was very much worth reading, and I appreciated this book for having a section about learning to regulate yourself before helping to teach your child (my personal biggest struggle in this toddler stage, I don't mind admitting).