[ book tip by ] As he narrates his own Antarctic expedition, Daniele Del Giudice recalls the notebooks of other courageous expeditions that are unknown to most, with shipwrecks, ships stuck for months behind ice, savage crews and sailors on the brink of desperation or annihilated by madness. These are the last true adventure writers who have created the myth and the memory of the Unknown Land, and possess an often tragic and emblematic fate as they are pushed to their limits.

Del Giudice travels to the ‘deepest and furthest’ parts of South Antarctica. From Santiago to Punta Arenas in Chile, and further down, until, ‘feeling embarrassed and impeccably Martian’, he reaches ‘another planet, a celestial body inhabited by millions of penguins’. Exploring the area, he finds stored in its ice the history of what has lived there and those who have sought to reach it.
With a work of storytelling marquetry, a patchwork of life and literature, the author reconstructs a ‘hyperexpedition’ that connects the explorers’ past trips and retraces their paths through the world alongside those contained in literature. Playing on the diversity of these different perspectives and voices, the author presents a ‘movable horizon’ in space and time, but one which is stable and long-lasting in the feelings it provokes.

This is a trip beyond all sense of time, set in a hypnotising landscape, indifferent to man but with a sublime beauty: from the yellow ochre of the plains to the glaciers that drip in the water, among rocky peaks, eternal snow, precipices and a horizon of ice and light.
They are places, stories, days, years and geological eras that defy simple linear narration. It’s a natural ancient landscape that stratifies everything and crystallises every memory. This book is the poem of these simultaneous worlds.

Source: http://www.euprizeliterature.eu/Dautoren.html

[ book info ] Del Giudice, Daniele: Orizzonte mobile. (Movable Horizon). (original language: Italian) Giulio Einaudi Editore, Torino, 2009 . ISBN: 8806197932.