This article is taken from the December-January 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
When I read that the French travel writer Sylvain Tesson hoped that a high-altitude ski trek across the Alps would help him realise his “longtime dream of transforming travel into prayer”, I wondered if he had lost his marbles. “Travel would become a displacement devoid of purpose, suspended in monochrome,” he went on. “There would be sweat, silence and ski tracks. The gates would open. Diluted, I would enter a virgin realm.”
This is a book about White — snow, fog, sky, snow, clouds and more snow — but perhaps in this bizarre supernatural-alchemical experiment he had got lost somewhere altogether darker, in the deep recesses of his fundament. I needn’t have worried. Although the levels of pretension can be off the charts, this latest offering from Tesson is a gem: unusually erudite, hugely readable, often funny and a little bit bonkers. That’s not a bad combination for a genre which can frequently feel stale in our era of mass travel.
I first came across Tesson more than a decade ago. Consolations of the Forest, the arresting account of his six-month sojourn in a three-by-three-metre log cabin in Siberia, six days’ walk from the nearest hamlet on Lake Baikal, won the Prix Médicis. He has since scooped the Prix Renaudot for The Art of Patience, his lyrical search for the snow leopard in Tibet.
In White, Tesson is back in his favourite element, following the curve of the Alps from Menton in the west to Trieste in the east, with a mountain guide friend and a backpack full of books, ropes, crampons and ski skins. It’s hard going, with daily slog-skiing up and down thousands of metres and many kilometres. “Onwards into this mystery we trudged. The White unified the world, disintegrated the ego, anaesthetized anxiety, expanded space, evaporated time. The element massed its matter to dissolve all shapes in its relentless radiance.” Each day mimics the last, ending in a mountain refuge Holy Trinity of soup, fire and bed.
Amidst the crashing storms and wind-shredded mountain passes, Tesson unleashes his own blizzard of literary name-dropping. Here comes a very French salon of Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Proust, Baudelaire, Gide, Montaigne, Chateaubriand and the inevitable, inescapable Sartre. Cicero is summoned to support his homily on the advantages of travelling light in life, a riposte to the mass consumerism he deplores: Omnia mea mecum porto, “All that is mine, I carry with me.”
One dark dawn, Tesson finds himself moving up the glacier towards the Dôme du Goûter at 4,300 metres, an invisible Mont Blanc looming above. He breaks into Baudelaire and concludes that “Classical alexandrines are the best metre for mechanical effort”. The pretension is excusable because — saving grace, unusual for a Frenchman? — he doesn’t take himself too seriously, readily mocking his far-fetched thoughts. Irreverent humour is never too far away, either.
Hacking his way up a voluptuous slope towards the Refuge du Couvercle, he reflects on how the great Italian mountaineer Reinhold Messner remembered women he had loved during a hellishly frozen Antarctic crossing, before segueing to Baudelaire imagining a feminine topography of contours and breasts. The reverie is quickly dispelled on arrival. “No erotic vision could have survived the sight of 30 skiers packed inside a hut meant for twelve.”
Tesson is a fine companion — honest, amusing and intensely thoughtful. After a 2,000-metre climb to the Rifugio Nacamuli, he meets a mountain guide who also runs an art gallery and publishes books, epitomising the “marriage of muscle and soul … of pen and piton”, the combination of “a rugged life and a refined mind” to which he aspires.
Wherever he finds himself in this chilly kingdom, his descriptive powers rise to the vertiginous occasion, beautifully translated by Christine Gutman. “At the Col du Petit Mont-Cenis,” he writes, “the wind scattered our thoughts to chance. It was gusting to 70 kilometres per hour. Blind beyond 10 metres, we advanced for two hours through the dense air, driven by a single objective: one step, then another. Determination was our blade. We were slicing through substance.”
Such are the powers of his pen, never mind his piton, that Tesson has an enviable ability to make even the mundane interesting. He even has a dig at his fellow French citizens, infantilised by an unaffordable welfare state.
He laments how in Paris everyone is offended, a victim of fate, wronged by life and “abandoned to ill winds by a state whose citizens demanded its total and utter assistance, all while protesting the slightest interference on its part”. Merde, is nothing sacred anymore?
