“I SAW THE HOME OF A GOD” (Ich sah die Heimat eines Gottes), says the protagonist of Christoph Ransmayr's Atlas eines ängstlichen Mannes (2012). Another chapter of this novel structured as a travelogue opens with the words “I saw an open grave” (Ich sah ein offenes Grab), and yet another with “I saw a distant figure” (Ich sah eine ferne Gestalt). Ransmayr's fiction, like Herzog's oeuvre, is filled with images of awesome, existentially terrifying, often violent nature in remote, extreme, dangerous locales. As extreme as Ransmayr's characters’ experiences are, they are often based on historical events; and he repeatedly inserts a Fichtean, and also romantic, “self-seeing eye” into his narratives: in Atlas, for instance, he opens each section of the travelogue with the words “I saw.” The jungles, wastelands, mountain ranges, and Arctic glaciers traversed are landscapes similar to those in his texts Der fliegende Berg (2007) and The Terrors of Ice and Darkness (Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis, 2006). And in Ransmayr's work as in Herzog’s, a male protagonist frequently either navigates these dangerous territories alone or conveys a sense of his loneliness and of experiencing himself as small in a vast space.

Terrors of Ice and Darkness features a temporal and spatial layering of these first-person perspectives, as an anonymous narrator relates the story of the disappearance of Josef Mazzini, a polar explorer reenacting a nineteenth-century expedition in 1981. Like a prose version of a painting by Caspar David Friedrich, Terrors constantly reminds us that we are observing others’ observations of stupendous nature. Atlas is the novel in which Ransmayr perhaps makes the seeing “I” most explicit, through the repetition of the phrase “I saw,” although nearly all of his texts insert an “I” into the death-defying and, occasionally, seemingly death-welcoming acts with which they are filled. Confronted with Arctic glacial ice, Himalayan heights, and raging oceans, Ransmayr's first-person narrators give the impression that they are tiny figures looking out at sublime landscapes, whether homes of gods or open graves.

Like Reinhold Messner, whose autobiographical work is novelistic, and who also intertwines fact and fiction in ways similar to Herzog, Ransmayr blends reality and imagination in ways that are normally transparent to the reader. The content of the narratives may have ambiguous, even murky, characteristics, but the formal techniques are typically relatively straightforward.