© Copyright – 2024 – Athletics Illustrated
Title: Outsider, An Old Man, a Mountain and the Search for a Hidden Past
Author: Brett Popplewell
Genre: Biography
Publisher: Harper Collins Publishers Ltd
Pages: 374
Publish date: 2023
ISBN: 978144344457859 softcover
ISBN: 9781443457866 hardcover
The review
“You’re never going to kill storytelling, because it’s built in the human plan. We come with it.”
— Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid’s Tale
In parlance to Atwood’s quote above, Brett Popplewell had a story to tell, and it was not fiction. But it might as well have been, it is so outrageous and entertaining; the protagonist came with it.
The protagonist
Dag Aaybe, the protagonist in Outsider could be a hybrid of Christopher McCandless from Into the Wild and Caballo Blanco from Born to Run, both very real characters, just as Aaybe is. All three shun the construct of society to live alone in the woods. Blanco (Micah True) was an aging, long-haired ultra runner living in the Copper Canyons amongst the Tarahumara Mexicans. He died on the trails, doing what he loves: running, but not before Christopher McDougall told his story in Born to Run.
Christopher McCandless, the protagonist in the book and movie Into the Wild is the story of a young man who seeks to live off the grid and away from the suburban society he grew up in. He ends up living and dying in an abandoned bus in Alaska, tragically his life is cut short by a poisonous plant he ate.
Aaybe lives in a bus too, however, his story crosses the plain of the unbelievable into Forrest Gump territory, only Aaybe does not seem to be on the autism spectrum — although that remains to be seen. We do know that the fictional character Gump was.
An author, psychologist and detective
Author Popplewell becomes deeply invested in researching Aaybe’s story. He is so fully immersed that he takes Aaybe to Norway and Sweden to search out the origins of his life story.
During the research process, Popplewell interweaves the story of his mother slowly declining due to cancer, his marriage and the birth of his first child. What he unearths from the Aaybe origin story is heartwrenching, and tragic but endearing. Popplewell becomes an unlikely psychologist and detective and an unlikely character in the story.
The tale begins, “The last of the Ubermensch runs through the night, alone. He carries no identification, but the scars on his face, hands and body tell of an 80-year struggle to survive on the edge of society. He has been starved, abandoned, and trapped in a foreign land for nearly 50 years, unable or unwilling to get back to the place that made him. Conceived in war, he is the aged, mangled remnant of a darker time. And yet, he is innocent.“
Outsider is spellbinding and a fascinating story to follow.
Although Aaybe is known as a reclusive ultra runner, extreme skier and enigma, he is human and his story to find out about his past and real identity is greater than the sum of the parts.
Non-running readers will find this story just as fascinating as any other. Athletics Illustrated recommends this read.
