Bøker av Sylvain Tesson

In Consolations of the Forest, Sylvain Tesson explains how he found a radical solution to his need for freedom, one as ancient as the experiences of the hermits of old Russia: he decided to lock himself alone in a cabin in the middle taiga, on the shores of Baikal, for six months. From February to July 2010, he lived in silence, solitude, and cold. His cabin, built by Soviet geologists in the Brezhnev years, is a cube of logs three meters by three meters, heated by a cast iron skillet, six-day walk from the nearest village and hundreds of miles of track. To live isolated from the world while retaining one's sanity requires a routine, Tesson discovered. In the morning, he would read, write, smoke, or draw, and then devoted hours to cutting the wood, shoveling snow, and fishing. Emotionally, these months proved a challenge, and the loneliness was crippling. Tesson found in paper a valuable confidant, the notebook, a polite companion. Noting carefully, almost daily, his impressions of the silence, his struggles to survive in a hostile nature, his despair, his doubts, but also its moments of ecstasy, inner peace and harmony with nature, Sylvain Tesson shares with us an extraordinary experience.Writer, journalist and traveler, Sylvain Tesson was born in 1972. After a world tour by bicycle, he developed a passion for Central Asia, and has travelled tirelessly since 1997. He came to prominence in 2004 with a remarkable travelogue, Axis of Wolf (Robert Laffont). Editions Gallimard have already published his A Life of a Mouthful (2009) and, with Thomas Goisque and Bertrand de Miollis, High Voltage (2009). In 2009 he won the Prix Goncourt for A Life of a Mouthful, and in 2011 won the Prix M dicis for non-fiction for Consolations of the Forest: Alone in Siberia.

Moscow to Paris in a sidecar: an epic, crazy 2,500 mile road trip following Napoleon's retreat

When Sylvain Tesson left the colourful yellow houses of the French Riveria for a ski trek across the Alps with his friend Daniel du Lac, a high-altitude mountain guide, he didn't know what exactly would await him.  Over the course of four years, from 2018 to 2021, they ascended high into the Alps in winter, following the curve of the mountains from the Mediterranean to the Adriatic, entering into a white world entirely of snow, bitterly cold and overlooked by an empty sky; only the effort of moving forward, one stride at a time, separated the days from one another.  He thought he was venturing into beauty but he was immersing himself in a substance. In the White of the high Alps all is cancelled out - hopes, fears, memories and regrets. What did he stand to gain by inflicting this ordeal on himself?  This was no ordinary mountain trek: it was communion with a substance.  Perhaps his longtime dream of transforming travel into prayer would come true at last.