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Cherry de Sara Wheeler

Cherry

Autor Sara Wheeler
en Limba Engleză Paperback – apr 2003

Dincolo de gheața care i-a sfărâmat dinții și de vântul care i-a smuls cortul în noaptea polară, Apsley Cherry-Garrard a rămas în istorie ca supraviețuitorul care a transformat trauma în literatură. Putem afirma că legătura dintre Sara Wheeler și subiectul său este una predestinată; fiind ea însăși o exploratoare a spațiilor înghețate, Wheeler posedă vocabularul necesar pentru a evoca acea lume „luminoasă și crudă”. Observăm cum biografa nu se mulțumește doar cu relatarea faptelor eroice, ci pătrunde în arhivele private pentru a descifra omul din spatele mitului.

Suntem de părere că această lucrare completează o piesă lipsă în istoria explorării. În aceeași familie cu The Worst Journey in the World, volumul adaugă o perspectivă psihologică profundă, explorând prăbușirea lui Cherry în depresie după întoarcerea din Antarctica. Dacă The Worst Journey in the World este cronica supraviețuirii fizice, Cherry este cronica supraviețuirii mentale. În contextul operei sale, Wheeler continuă explorarea începută în The Magnetic North, dar aici abandonează vastitatea geografică pentru o cartografiere a interiorului uman.

Structura narativă este cinematică, purtându-ne de la entuziasmul tânărului care pleca spre Polul Sud alături de căpitanul Scott, până la încurajările vecinului său, George Bernard Shaw, care l-a împins să scrie. Tonul este echilibrat, evitând hagiografia în favoarea unui portret onest al unui erou fragil, susținut de hărți și facsimile care oferă greutate istorică fiecărei pagini.

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Specificații

ISBN-13: 9780375754548
ISBN-10: 0375754547
Pagini: 386
Ilustrații: 16-PP PHOTO INSERT & 3 MAPS
Dimensiuni: 132 x 203 x 21 mm
Greutate: 0.43 kg
Editura: Random House

De ce să citești această carte

Recomandăm această biografie cititorilor pasionați de istoria explorărilor și de reziliența spiritului uman. Veți câștiga o înțelegere nuanțată a celei mai faimoase expediții polare, văzută prin ochii celui care a supraviețuit pentru a-i spune povestea. Este o lectură despre curaj, dar mai ales despre costul psihologic al eroismului, oferind un context esențial pentru oricine a citit memoriile clasice ale lui Cherry-Garrard.

Despre autor

Sara Wheeler este considerată una dintre cele mai importante scriitoare de călătorie din Marea Britanie, fiind recunoscută pentru stilul său „intrépid și plin de spirit”. Opera sa pendulează între explorarea zonelor geografice extreme, precum în The Magnetic North, unde a navigat pe Oceanul Arctic, și analiza profundă a societăților aflate în schimbare, așa cum a făcut în Mud and Stars în timpul călătoriilor sale prin Rusia. Expertiza sa în regiunile polare și accesul exclusiv la arhivele familiei Cherry-Garrard o transformă în biograful ideal pentru a documenta viața complexă a exploratorului antarctic.

Recenzii

“Utterly fascinating...Wheeler has given us an important new understanding of the most notorious calamity in the annals of twentieth-century exploration. Cherry is a wonderful book.” —Jon Krakauer, author of Into Thin Air

“Beautifully written...Wheeler’s vocabulary to evoke this luminous and cruel continent...appears limitless.” —Caroline Alexander, The New York Times Book Review

“Spellbinding...Cherry is an exquisite work.” —The Washington Post

“Accomplishes what only the best biographies can....She is able to satisfy the reader’s curiosity of how it must have felt to be on that doomed expedition.” —The Times (London)

“With this wonderful biography Sara Wheeler has now vaulted into the front rank of modern British writers....Cherry is so much more than a story of one remarkable man. It is, among other things, an exploration of the mind, a tour through the notions of national identity and pride, and a celebration of the tensile strength of the human spirit.” —Simon Winchester

Notă biografică

Sara Wheeler spent seven months in Antarctica in 1995 as writer in residence with the U.S. Polar Program. She is the author of Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica, an international bestseller chosen by Beryl Bainbridge as one of the best books of the year, and Travels in a Thin Country, a finalist for the Thomas Cook Award, both available from the Modern Library.


From the Hardcover edition.

Extras

Chapter 1
Ancestral Voices

In the restless years of middle age Cherry used to sit in the bow-window of his library, turning the pages of the journals he had kept in the Antarctic three decades before. Absorbed in those far-off years, he jotted notes in the margins, as if the expedition had not yet reached its conclusion. ‘All Scott’s men had been altered,’ he wrote crossly. ‘Scott should have asked the doctors for their advice.’ Beyond the trimmed lawns outside, the familiar figure of Tilbury, the head gardener, stooped over the rhododendrons. The rooks returned to their nests in the elms, briefly darkening the sky. Cherry leafed through the flimsy notebook, recalling the rippled glaciers that tumbled down Mount Erebus, their gleaming cliffs casting long blue shadows; the crunching patter of dogs on the march; the pale, shadowless light of the ice shelf and a smudgy sun wreathed in mist. ‘Those first days of sledging were wonderful!’ he had written. In the quiet of his library he heard again the hiss of the Primus after a long, hard day on the trail, and smelt the homely infusion of tobacco as the night sun sieved through the green cambric of the tent. He tasted the tea flavored with burnt blubber, and felt the rush of relief as tiny point of light from the kippered hut glimmered faintly in the unforgiving darkness of an Antarctic winter. ‘Can we ever forget those days?’ he wrote.
Cherry tortured himself over his action in February 1912, when he had driven a team of dogs 150 miles south to a foot depot to wait for Captain Scott and his four companions; they were expected to return from the Pole at any day. Winter was closing in and Cherry was navigating for the first time in his life, desperately handicapped by short sight, brutal temperatures and diminishing light. He reached the foot depot with his Russian dogdriver, and, following instructions, they stopped, pinned down in a tiny tent in hundreds of miles of opaque, swirling drift. They could not go on: they had no dog food to spare. Cherry remembered straining his eyes in the milky light of the Great Ice Barrier, looking for men who never came. One night he was so sure he could see figured approaching that he had reached for his boots and set out to meet them.
The truth was that he could have gone on. He could have pressed on through the blizzard, killing a dog at a time to feed the others. He had been ordered to spare the dogs, but, as he had once written, ‘In this sort of life orders have to be elastic.’ If he had killed the dogs, and if he had journeyed just twelve-and-a-half miles further, there was a tiny chance that he might have stumbled on a small pyramid tent in which three men were dying. One was Captain Scott. The other two were Birdie Bowers and Bill Wilson, the closest friends Cherry had ever had. It was Bill who had got him onto the expedition; Bill who had stood in for his dead father; Bill who had taught him the things he came to think were most important. In death and in life, Bill as never far from Cherry’s mind. ‘If you simply knew him,” he wrote of his mentor, ‘you could not like him: you simply had to love him.’ When, having missed Scott and the others, he got back to the hut that was their Antarctic base, Cherry dreamt that his friends walked in. Almost two decades later he noted in the margin of his polar journal, ‘My relief was so intense that I can remember waking up to the disappointment even now.’
Ten months after the journey to the food depot Cherry and a search party found the tent, piled with snow and weighted to the ice by three mottled corpses. He went through Bill’s pockets, collecting the contents for his widow. The body was hard, like stone. After prayers, they left the three men side by side in their sleeping bags, removing the bamboo tent poles and collapsing the cambric over them. The sun was dipping low over the Pole, the Barrier almost in shadow, and the sky was a mass of iridescent cloud, dark against gold and emerald. Cherry said it was a grave which kings must envy.
From that day, he was obsessed by the thought that he might have saved them. ‘If we [he and the Russian dog-driver] had traveled on for a day and a half,’ he wrote, ‘We might have left some food and oil on one of the cairns, hoping that they would see it.’ It was a devastating realization. ‘But we never dreamed that they were in great want. It will always to the end of my life be a great sorrow to me that we did not do this.”


From the Hardcover edition.

Descriere scurtă

Apsley Cherry-Garrard was one of the youngest members of Robert Falcon Scott’s legendary expedition to Antarctica, the last man sent out to meet Captain Scott and his men in February 1912, when they were expected to return victorious any day from the South Pole. He embarked on his own epic journey into the Antarctic winter to collect eggs of the Emperor penguin. It was dark all the time, his teeth shattered, and the tent blew away in the cold. “But we kept our tempers,” he wrote, “even with God.”

After serving in the First World War, with zealous encouragement from his neighbor George Bernard Shaw, Cherry wrote the undisputed masterpiece of polar literature, The Worst Journey in the World. But as the years progressed, he faced a terrible struggle against depression and despair. Sara Wheeler’s Cherry is the first biography of this great hero of Antarctic exploration, written with unrestricted access to his papers and with the full cooperation of his family.

Descriere

Wheeler's "Cherry" is the first biography of the man who shaped the myth of Robert Falcon Scott, written with unrestricted access to his papers and the full cooperation of his widow, who has refused all requests until now.