De expresión inmensamente triste, rara belleza y vida trágica, Annemarie Schwarzenbach no dejó indiferentes a cuantos la conocieron, como Thomas Mann y sus hijos, André Malraux y Carson McCullers, quien le dedicó su libro Reflejos en un ojo dorado. Viajó a Persia una y otra vez atraída por su pasado, los desiertos, los jardines paradisíacos, los valles solitarios. Escrito en 1936, este «diario impersonal», como ella lo definió, es una mezcla de autobiografía, crónica de viaje y ficción, donde la voz desgarrada de la narradora se funde con la grandeza turbadora de unos paisajes convertidos en espejo de sus miedos, su soledad y su amor por una joven turca.

More romantic and emotionally overwrought than I prefer, but formally interesting. Schwarzenbach plays a bit role in Enard's recent Compass, and I look forward to reading plenty of Annemarie, and then re-reading that novel. ( )

I think a lot about a guy I travelled with when I was a teenager and living briefly in Morocco – he was a genial, moon-faced, gangly kid called Iain who seemed to love every new place we visited; he lounged expansively at medina tea-rooms, squinted beatifically into Essaouiran sunsets, and could score a fistful of hash within minutes of disembarking at a bus station. I can almost see him now…angling his head and grinning from ear to ear.

Some weeks after we parted ways, he killed himself in one of the many anonymous, cheap hotel rooms that student travellers tend to inhabit. I never understood. He always seemed like the happiest person any of us knew. My attempts to come to terms with what he must have been feeling – and hiding – came to be associated in my head with the novels of Paul Bowles, whom I read around that time, and for whom foreign countries, foreign cultures, were always the grounds for a certain kind of deep, existential terror. ‘The sky hides the night behind it,’ he wrote of the Moroccan Sahara, ‘and shelters the people beneath from the horror that lies above.’ Is that how Iain felt, I used to wonder?

In this sparse, crafted journal, Swiss wanderer Annemarie Schwarzenbach, whose life was too extraordinary to summarise in this review, explores the same kind of feeling that The Sheltering Sky explores in fiction. Her setting is Persia, not North Africa, but there is the same blank refusal to cope with the expanses of desert, the same near-fatal Kulturschock, the same sense of being stranded in a landscape that is ‘too vast’ (as she puts it) in both time and space. It exacerbates some profound fear in Schwarzenbach's mind which she never clearly articulates for us. ‘The danger has many names,’ she records, evasively:

Sometimes it's called homesickness; sometimes it's the arid, high-altitude wind that tugs at your nerves; sometimes it's the alcohol, sometimes worse poisons. Sometimes it has no name…

It was 1934 and she was working on an archaeological dig in the Lar Valley, a remote spot which she characterises as being ‘the end of the world’. In her clear-eyed, melancholy descriptions, the Iranian landscape has an apocalyptic bleakness, its mountains and valleys always described by moonlight and filled with vultures, dead gazelles, and rivers that are ‘moon-streams […] black yet specular as a mirror’ where dead fish float belly-up. She is there with friends, who try to look after her; but watch how quickly she can cross over from their company into something completely different:

I put my glass down by my deckchair and went out. The door was just a frame with a mosquito net stretched across it. The sensation was familiar, pushing aside the thin partition that separated a room filled with peaceful, lamplit warmth from the great surrealism that lay outside—the moonlight, the gleam of the desert, the strips of ground you could cross up to the starkly white, rocky ridges, the place of royal tombs where ibex spent the night and foreign ships with paralysed sails lay for eternity.

And it's this ‘great surrealism’ – what she elsewhere calls ‘Persia's terrible sadness’ – that touches something raw within her. Some people travel to find comfort for these feelings. But others, like Schwarzenbach, find instead that ‘there is no true comfort in such countries’. There are a couple of extraordinary moments in here where, reaching for a language to reflect her emotions, Schwarzenbach describes having agonised conversations with an angel in her tent. These exchanges – metaphorical, hallucinated, imaginary, we aren't sure – provide no reassurance at all, but instead seem to represent a nightmarish personification of Schwarzenbach's own feelings of immobility and paranoia.

‘You cannot move,’ said the angel pleasantly, ‘you are utterly helpless and exposed to the angels of this land, who are terrible creatures.’

And later, by way of a pep talk:

‘You know very well that no one can enter the heart of another and become as one, not even for the shortest moment. Even your mother only made you flesh, and at your first breath you breathed in solitude.’

It's not exactly Highway to Heaven material. The love affair that Schwarzenbach relates in the second half of Death in Persia might, perhaps, have pulled her round, if it hadn't built up to the tragic climax that we are already expecting thanks to the book's title. As it is, Death in Persia – not unlike a Bowles novel – purifies at the end into a spare expression of loss and anxiety. ‘The future is dead,’ she writes in the last few pages, ‘not a breath of air stirs there, no colour, no darkness, no light, and the path there is long and too far for me to go.’

Schwarzenbach in fact survived the suicide attempt she made some years later, but, in one of life's hideous ironies, subsequently fell off her bicycle and died from complications of a head injury at the ridiculous age of 34. Like her nineteenth-century compatriot Isabelle Eberhardt, she writes about the loneliness of travel as well as anyone I've read, and she also, with her plain evocations of isolation and paralysis, helps to elucidate states of mind that I've been struggling to understand for many years. ( )