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WORK TITLE: The Eight Mountains
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1/27/1978
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: Italian
http://paolocognetti.blogspot.com/; https://www.minimumfax.com/autore/paolo-cognetti-1750
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: no2005099792
LC classification: PQ4903.O36
Personal name heading:
Cognetti, Paolo, 1978-
Found in: Manuale per ragazze di successo, 2004: t.p. (Paolo
Cognetti) p. 4 of cover (b. 1978, Milano)
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PERSONAL
Born January 27, 1978, in Milan, Italy.
EDUCATION:Attended college; graduate of the Civic School of Cinema, Milan, Italy.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, novelist, editor, and documentary filmmaker.
AWARDS:Awards for The Eight Mountains: Strega Prize, 2017; the Prix Médicis étranger; the prix François Sommer, 2018; the Itas Prize; the Viadana Prize; and the Leggimontagna Prize.
WRITINGS
The Eight Mountains has been published in thirty countries. Author maintains a blog.
SIDELIGHTS
Paolo Cognetti is an award-winning Italian writer and documentary filmmaker. He is the author of short stories and nonfiction, including two personal guides to New York City published in Italian. In his debut novel published in English, The Eight Mountains, Cognetti tells the story of two young Italian boys from different backgrounds. Pietro Guasti comes from a middle-class family that goes on holiday in the Alpine village of Grana in the foothills of the Dolomites, a rugged mountain range located in northeastern Italy. Pietro meets Bruno Guglielmina there. Despite the fact that Bruno comes from a poor family and is a cow herder, the two boys form a bond that will last for many years. Pietro serves as the novel’s narrator many years later when he is a documentary filmmaker.
Pietro is eleven years old when he first meets Bruno. At the time, Pietro is trying his best to go along with his father’s extremely difficult regimen for mountain climbing. The two boys are not friends for long when Pietro begins to think that the rugged, simpler Bruno is probably the kind of son that his father would prefer to have. Readers learn in an introductory chapter that Pietro’s father, Giovanni, was caught in an avalanche with his friend Piero, who died in the accident. Giovanni ends up marrying Piero’s sister, whose family ostracizes them both. For the most part, Giovanni is a loner who suddenly comes to life whenever the family goes to Grana, where he can climb mountains. At the very young age of six, Pietro began demanding that his father take him along. Nevertheless, the relationship between the two becomes somewhat distant. “Although astute observations on human behaviour carry the novel to its close, it is Pietro’s troubled relationship with his withdrawn father that makes for the most absorbing part of the book,” wrote Irish Times Online contributor Sarah Gilmartin.
The novel is primarily broken up into three parts, beginning with “The Mountain of Childhood,” which relates Pietro’s youth and his time roaming the mountains with his father and Bruno. Eventually, however, Bruno’s father takes him off to learn the construction trade. Pietro will not see Bruno again until he is sixteen years old. “The House of Reconciliation” is the second part of the novel and finds Pietro failing to reconnect with his father prior to his father’s death. Pietro goes to Grana with his mother and hikes the trails his father loved. Here he reconnects with Bruno. The two end up rebuilding an isolated house they call Barma high on the mountain, which they then share, as Pietro believes his father would have wanted. In the third part of the novel, titled “A Friend in Winter,” Bruno loses his family and his farm due to his desire never to leave the mountain. Pietro comes back to find him alone in Barma and refusing Pietro’s pleas for Bruno to come down off the mountain and join civilization. Pietro comes to ponder the true difference between Bruno, who has decided to literally stay in one spot, and himself as someone who has traveled the world.
“Beyond its mountain setting and understated portraits of a dysfunctional family and a complicated friendship, The Eight Mountains constitutes a moving meditation on man in time and nature,” wrote Michele Levy in World Literature Today. Noting that the novel’s title comes from a legend in Nepal about the many human experiences that naturally occur, a Publishers Weekly contributor went on to write that The Eight Mountains illustrates how Pietro and Bruno “can be understood as different sides of the same soul.” Some reviewers noted that the novel reflects Cognetti’s own life and love of the outdoors. Writing in BookPage, Jeff Vasishta remarked: “The outdoors and home building are described throughout The Eight Mountains with such specificity that these sections are part instruction manual, part diary.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
BookPage, April, 2018, Jeff Vasishta, review of The Eight Mountains, p. 20.
Publishers Weekly, January 8, 2018, review of The Eight Mountains, p. 38.
Vogue, March, 2018, Megan O’Grady, “Growing Up And Stepping Out,” includes review of The Eight Mountains, p. 306.
World Literature Today, March-April, 2018, Michele Levy, review of The Eight Mountains, p. 69.
ONLINE
Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona (CCCB) Website, http://www.cccb.org/en/ (May 28, 2018), author profile.
Guardian Online (London, England), https://www.theguardian.com/ (March 18, 2018), Ben East, The Eight Mountains by Paolo Cognetti Review–Friends in High Places.”
Idle Woman, https://theidlewoman.net/ (December 22, 2017), review of Eight Mountains.
Irish Times, https://www.irishtimes.com/ (March 17, 2018), Sarah Gilmartin, “The Eight Mountains Review: An Arduous Ascent into Adulthood.”
Malatesta Literary Agency, http://www.agenziamalatesta.com/ (May 28, 2018), author profile.
Mondadori, http://www.mondadori.com/ (July 13, 2017), “Paolo Cognetti Wins the 2017 Premio Strega 2017 with ‘Le otto montagne.'”
Seeing the World through Books, http://marywhipplereviews.com/ (April 22, 2018), Mary Whipple, review of Eight Mountains.
Paolo Cognetti is an Italian writer, novelist, and editor from Milan. He divides his time between the city and his cabin in the Italian Alps.
Paolo Cognetti
Da Wikipedia, l'enciclopedia libera.
Premio Premio Strega 2017
Paolo Cognetti (Milano, 27 gennaio 1978) è uno scrittore italiano.
Foto del 2010
Ha vinto il Premio Strega 2017.
Indice
1 Biografia
2 Opere
2.1 Narrativa
2.2 Saggi
3 Note
4 Altri progetti
5 Collegamenti esterni
Biografia
Paolo Cognetti ha cominciato a scrivere verso i diciotto anni. Ha studiato matematica all'università e letteratura statunitense da autodidatta. Abbandonati gli studi accademici, nel 1999 si è diplomato alla Civica Scuola di Cinema di Milano. Nel decennio successivo si è dedicato alla realizzazione di documentari a carattere sociale, politico e letterario.
Come narratore ha esordito nel 2003 con il racconto Fare ordine, vincitore del Premio Subway-Letteratura e l'anno successivo all'interno dell'antologia La qualità dell'aria, curata da Nicola Lagioia e Christian Raimo. Negli anni seguenti ha pubblicato le due raccolte di racconti Manuale per ragazze di successo (2004) e Una cosa piccola che sta per esplodere (2007) e il "romanzo di racconti" Sofia si veste sempre di nero (2012), tutti usciti per minimum fax, vincitori di numerosi premi.
Dopo una serie di documentari sulla letteratura americana (Scrivere/New York, 2004) ha pubblicato nel 2010 New York è una finestra senza tende, seguito nel 2014 da Tutte le mie preghiere guardano verso ovest, due guide personali alla città di New York. Nel 2015 ha inoltre curato per Einaudi l'antologia New York Stories. L'altra passione di Cognetti è la montagna, dove trascorre in solitudine alcuni mesi all'anno. Da questi eremitaggi è nato un diario, Il ragazzo selvatico, del 2013. Nel 2014 è uscito per minimum fax A pesca nelle pozze più profonde, una meditazione sull'arte di scrivere racconti.
Nel 2009 ha vinto il premio Lo Straniero, riconoscimento attribuito dalla rivista Lo Straniero diretta da Goffredo Fofi ad artisti, saggisti, operatori, iniziative culturali e sociali di particolare spessore e generosità, con la seguente motivazione: "Paolo Cognetti, milanese, è tra i giovani scrittori italiani (ha da poco superato i trent'anni) uno dei più attenti a sentire e narrare il disagio delle nuove generazioni e gli anni difficili dell'adolescenza di questi anni, di fronte a un contesto di incerta sostanza e di sicurezza precaria. È anche autore di documentari e inchieste sulla giovane letteratura statunitense, ma sono le sue raccolte di racconti ad aver convinto del suo talento e del suo rigore, e della sua moralità di scrittore vero"".[1]
L'8 novembre del 2016 è uscito per Einaudi il suo primo romanzo in senso stretto: Le otto montagne, venduto in 30 paesi ancor prima della pubblicazione,[2] con il quale si è aggiudicato il Premio Strega 2017.[3], il Prix Médicis étranger, il prix François Sommer 2018 , l'English Pen Translates Award, il Premio Itas, il Premio Viadana e il Premio Leggimontagna.[4].
Opere
Narrativa
Fare ordine. [Genere: storia d'amore; 1 racconto da 5 fermate], Milano, Comune, Settore giovani, 2003.
Manuale per ragazze di successo in La qualità dell'aria. Storie di questo tempo, a cura di Nicola Lagioia e Christian Raimo, Roma, Minimum fax, 2004. ISBN 88-7521-012-8.
Manuale per ragazze di successo, Roma, Minimum fax, 2004. ISBN 88-7521-034-9. [sette racconti. Finalista al Premio Bergamo 2005]
Una cosa piccola che sta per esplodere, Roma, Minimum fax, 2007. ISBN 978-88-7521-137-0. [raccolta di cinque racconti. Vincitore del Premio Settembrini 2008, sezione giovani. Finalista al Premio Chiara 2008. Vincitore del Premio Renato Fucini 2009]
Sofia si veste sempre di nero, Roma, Minimum fax, 2012. ISBN 978-88-7521-440-1. [romanzo di racconti. Finalista al Premio Strega 2013]
Il nuotatore, con Mara Cerri, Roma, Orecchio Acerbo, 2013. ISBN 978-88-96806-66-1.
Le otto montagne, Torino, Einaudi, 2016. ISBN 978-88-06-22672-5. [romanzo. Vincitore del Premio Strega 2017.[5] Vincitore del Premio Strega Giovani 2017. Vincitore del Premio Strega OFF 2017[6]], del Prix Médicis étranger e dell'English Pen Translates Award nel 2017[4].
I lanciatori, in effe – Periodico di Altre Narratività, numero 6[7], 2017.
Saggi
New York è una finestra senza tende, con DVD, Roma-Bari, Laterza, 2010. ISBN 978-88-420-9218-6. [prima parte di una guida alla città di New York]
Il ragazzo selvatico. Quaderno di montagna, Milano, Terre di Mezzo, 2013. ISBN 978-88-6189-235-4.
Tutte le mie preghiere guardano verso Ovest, Torino, Edt, 2014. ISBN 978-88-592-0450-3. [seconda parte di una guida alla città di New York]
A pesca nelle pozze più profonde. Meditazioni sull'arte di scrivere racconti, Roma, Minimum fax, 2014. ISBN 978-88-7521-594-1.
GOOGLE TRANSLATE:
aolo Cognetti ( Milan , 27 January 1978 ) is an Italian writer .
Photos of 2010
He won the Strega Award 2017 .
Index
1 Biography
2 Works
2.1 Fiction
2.2 Essays
3 Notes
4 Other projects
5 External links
Biography
Paolo Cognetti began writing at eighteen. He studied mathematics at university and American literature as self-taught. Abandoned his academic studies, in 1999 he graduated from the Civic School of Cinema in Milan . In the following decade he dedicated himself to the production of social, political and literary documentaries.
As a narrator, he debuted in 2003 with the story Fare Fare , winner of the Subway-Literature Prize and the following year in the anthology Air quality , curated by Nicola Lagioia and Christian Raimo . In the following years he published the two collections of short stories Handbook for successful girls (2004) and A little thing that is about to explode (2007) and the "romance of stories" Sofia always dresses in black (2012), all out for minimum fax , winners of numerous awards.
After a series of documentaries on American literature ( Writing / New York , 2004) published in 2010 New York is a window without curtains , followed in 2014 by All my prayers look to the west , two personal guides to the city of New York. In 2015 he also edited the anthology New York Stories for Einaudi . The other passion of Cognetti is the mountain, where he spends alone a few months a year. From these hermitages, a diary was born, Il ragazzo selvatico , from 2013. In 2014 he went out for a minimum fax A fishing in the deepest pools , a meditation on the art of writing stories.
In 2009 he won the Lo Straniero prize , an award given by Lo Straniero magazine directed by Goffredo Fofi to artists, essayists, operators, cultural and social initiatives of particular depth and generosity, with the following motivation: " Paolo Cognetti, from Milan, is among the young Italian writers (just over thirty years old) one of the most attentive to hear and narrate the discomfort of the new generations and the difficult years of adolescence of these years, faced with a context of uncertain substance and precarious security. He is also the author of documentaries and surveys on young American literature, but it is his collections of stories that have convinced his talent and his rigor, and his morality as a true writer "". [1]
On 8 November 2016 Einaudi released his first novel in the strict sense: The eight mountains , sold in 30 countries even before publication, [2] with which he won the Strega Prize 2017 . [3] , the Prix Médicis étranger , the prix François Sommer 2018, the English Pen Translates Award, the Itas Prize, the Viadana Prize and the Leggimontagna Prize. [4] .
Works
Fiction
To order. [Genre: love story; 1 story with 5 stops] , Milan, City Hall, Youth Sector, 2003.
Manual for successful girls in Air quality. Stories of this time , edited by Nicola Lagioia and Christian Raimo , Rome, Minimum fax , 2004 . ISBN 88-7521-012-8 .
Manual for Successful Girls , Rome, Minimum fax, 2004. ISBN 88-7521-034-9 . [seven stories. Finalist for the Bergamo Award 2005]
A small thing that is about to explode , Rome, Minimum fax, 2007 . ISBN 978-88-7521-137-0 . [collection of five stories. Winner of the 2008 Settembrini Prize , youth section. Finalist at the Chiara Award 2008. Winner of the Renato Fucini Award 2009]
Sofia always dresses in black , Rome, Minimum fax, 2012 . ISBN 978-88-7521-440-1 . [novel of stories. Finalist at the Strega Award 2013]
The swimmer , with Mara Cerri , Rome, Orecchio Acerbo, 2013. ISBN 978-88-96806-66-1 .
The eight mountains , Turin, Einaudi , 2016 . ISBN 978-88-06-22672-5 . [novel. Winner of the 2017 Strega Award . [5] Winner of the Young Strega Prize 2017 . Winner of the Strega Award OFF 2017 [6] ], of the Prix Médicis étranger and of the English Pen Translates Award in 2017 [4] .
The launchers , in effect of Other Narrativity , number 6 [7] , 2017.
Essays
New York is a window without curtains , with DVD, Rome-Bari, Laterza , 2010 . ISBN 978-88-420-9218-6 . [first part of a guide to the city of New York]
The wild boy . Mountain notebook , Milan, Terre di Mezzo , 2013 . ISBN 978-88-6189-235-4 .
All my prayers look to the West , Turin, Edt , 2014 . ISBN 978-88-592-0450-3 . [second part of a guide to the city of New York]
A fishing in the deepest pools . Meditations on the art of writing stories , Rome, Minimum fax, 2014 . ISBN 978-88-7521-594-1 .
Notes
Paolo Cognetti wins the 2017 Premio Strega 2017 with “Le otto montagne”
On Thursday 6 July, in the captivating space of the Ninfeo of the Villa Giulia in Rome, Paolo Cognetti won the 71st Premio Strega with his nove Le otto montagne (The Eight Mountains). The author, who also won the 4th edition of the Premio Strega Giovani 2017, an award for young writers, clearly moved and delighted by this prestigious recognition, dedicated the prize to the mountains, “because it’s an area that has been abandoned, forgotten and destroyed, often by the city, and I decided that I wanted to write about that. I have tried to be a sort of spokesman, a go-between, for the mountains, the plain and the city, that all seem very far away. I also try to write these stories for people who don’t know the mountains and live too far away from them, trying, in some way, to save the world I live in.” “Being here,” he added, “is like a dream come true, not so much a dream of winning a prize, as being a writer and being able to live on my work.”
From the beginning, Le otto montagne has been a literary phenomenon, something that was made clear by the competition among the publishers who wanted to publish it around the world. In fact, the novel has already been translated into more than 30 languages.
13 Jul 2017
Tag:
2017,books,Einaudi
You can refer to:
Paola Novarese Head of communications Giulio Einaudi editore Tel. +39 011 56561
Contacts
Cognetti cover
Le otto montagne tells the story of Pietro, a solitary and somewhat argumentative city boy, and his relationship with his parents, his friend Bruno and, above all, with the mountains. From the stage of the Strega prize the author reminded the audience that nature is a word used by people who live in cities.”
In their lean, hard and wild beauty, the mountains leave a permanent mark on the soul, an imprint on those who are born there and those who love them. It becomes a category of the spirit, and even when one leaves, in search of a more comfortable and easier place, you can never really break away. All it takes is a sound, a smell, and you are sucked straight back in. This is what happens to the characters in the novel. They just can’t manage without, the come and go, but never really leave.
It is a story of “fathers and sons, of abandoning civilisations, of the freedom of living wild. I have always kept with me the memory of the great happiness I experienced as a boy in the woods. Whatever destiny is, it lives in the mountains we have above our heads.” (Paolo Cognetti).
Paolo Cognetti
Nato a Milano nel 1978, ha lavorato per diversi anni come documentarista. Insegna tecniche di narrazione in diverse scuole.
Ha esordito con la raccolta di racconti Manuale per ragazze di successo (minimum fax 2004), a cui è seguita Una cosa piccola che sta per esplodere (minimum fax 2007), Selezione Premio Fucini, Premio Settembrini e Premio Chiara.
Ha scritto New York è una finestra senza tende (Contromano/Laterza 2010) e Il ragazzo selvatico (Terre di Mezzo 2013), tradotto in tredici Paesi, ripubblicato in Italia in autunno 2017 in un'edizione illustrata da Alessandro Sanna.
Nel 2014 ha pubblicato Il nuotatore, illustrato da Mara Cerri, per l'editore orecchio acerbo, Tutte le mie preghiere guardano verso ovest (Edt, maggio 2014) e A pesca nelle pozze più profonde, meditazioni sull'arte di scrivere racconti (minimum fax).
Ha scritto Sofia si veste sempre di nero (minimum fax 2012) selezionato al Premio Strega e tradotto in vari Paesi.
Ha curato l'antologia di racconti New York Stories, uscita per Einaudi a novembre 2015.
Il suo romanzo Le otto montagne è uscito in libreria a novembre 2016 per Einaudi ed è in corso di traduzione in più di trenta Paesi.
Paolo Cognetti ha vinto il Premio Strega 2017 e il Premio Strega Giovani 2017.
GOOGLE TRANSLATE
Paolo Cognetti
Born in Milan in 1978, he worked for several years as a documentarist. He teaches storytelling techniques in different schools.
He made his debut with the collection of short stories Manual for Successful Girls (minimum fax 2004), which was followed by One Little Things That Is About to Explode (minimum fax 2007), Premio Fucini Award, Premio Settembrini and Premio Chiara.
He wrote New York is a window without curtains (Contromano / Laterza 2010) and Il ragazzo selvatico (Terre di Mezzo 2013), translated into thirteen countries, republished in Italy in autumn 2017 in an edition illustrated by Alessandro Sanna.
In 2014 he published Il swimmer , illustrated by Mara Cerri, for the publisher unripe ear , All my prayers look to the west (Edt, May 2014) and A peach in the deepest pools , meditations on the art of writing stories (minimum fax). He wrote Sofia always dresses in black (minimum fax 2012) selected for the Strega Prize and translated in various countries. He edited the anthology of stories New York Stories , released for Einaudi in November 2015. His novel The eight mountains was released in bookstores in November 2016 for Einaudi and is being translated into more than thirty countries. Paolo Cognetti won the Strega Prize 2017 and the Strega Giovani Prize 2017.
Milan, 1978) A writer and documentary maker, he began his career as a fiction writer with short stories, for example Una cosa piccola che sta per esplodere (2007). After a long stay in New York, as a result of which he wrote two personal guides of the city (New York è una finestra senza tende, 2010, and Tutte le mie preghiere guardano verso ovest, 2014), Cognetti returned to Italy where he lived for extended periods in the Aosta Valley where he had spent his childhood holidays. His own experience of the mountains provides the background for his recent books Il ragazzo selvatico: quaderno di montagna (in Spanish, El muchacho silvestre, Minúscula, 2017, Catalan edition 2018) and The Eight Mountains (in Catalan, Les vuit muntanyes, Navona, 2018, and in Spanish, Las ocho montañas, Literatura Random House, 2018). The latter work, his first novel, has been awarded the 2017 Strega and Strega Giovani, Médicis Étranger and English Pen Translates prizes.
Update: 25 January 2018
Paolo Cognetti
Autore
Paolo Cognetti è nato a Milano nel 1978.
È autore di alcuni documentari - Vietato scappare, Isbam, Box, La notte del leone, Rumore di fondo - che raccontano il rapporto tra i ragazzi, il territorio e la memoria. Per minimum fax media ha realizzato la serie Scrivere/New York, nove puntate su altrettanti scrittori newyorkesi, da cui è tratto il documentario Il lato sbagliato del ponte, viaggio tra gli scrittori di Brooklyn.
Per minimum fax ha pubblicato Manuale per ragazze di successo (2004), Una cosa piccola che sta per esplodere (2007), vincitore, tra gli altri, del Premio Fucini, del Premio Settembrini e finalista al Premio Chiara, Sofia si veste sempre di nero, selezionato al Premio Strega 2013 e A pesca nelle pozze più profonde. Meditazioni sull'arte di scrivere racconti. Ha vinto il Premio Strega Giovani e il Premio Strega con il romanzo Le otto montagne (Einaudi 2016).
Il suo blog è paolocognetti.blogspot.it.
Paolo Cognetti: tutti i libri nel nostro catalogo
Paolo Cognetti: bibliografia
Le otto montagne, Einaudi, 2016
Tutte le mie preghiere guardano verso Ovest, EDT 2014
Il nuotatore, con Mara Cerri, Orecchio Acerbo, 2013
Il ragazzo selvatico, Terre di Mezzo, 2013
New York è una finestra senza tende, Laterza, 2010
GOOGLE TRANSLATE
Paolo Cognetti was born in Milan in 1978.
He is the author of some documentaries - Banned from escaping , Isbam , Box , The Lion's Night , Background Noise - that recount the relationship between children, territory and memory. For minimum fax media, he has created the Writing / New York series , nine episodes on the same number of New York writers, from which the documentary The wrong side of the bridge , a journey among the writers of Brooklyn, is based.
For minimum fax published Manual for successful girls (2004), A small thing that is about to explode (2007), winner of the Premio Fucini, of the Premio Settembrini and finalist of the Chiara Prize, Sofia always dresses in black , selected for the 2013 Strega Award and fishing in the deepest pools . Meditations on the art of writing stories . He won the Young Strega Prize and the Strega Prize with the novel Le otto montagne (Einaudi 2016).
His blog is paolocognetti.blogspot.it .
THE EIGHT MOUNTAINS
Jeff Vasishta
BookPage. (Apr. 2018): p20.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
Full Text:
THE EIGHT MOUNTAINS
By Paolo Cognetti
Atria $23.99, 224 pages ISBN 9781501169885 Audio, eBook available
COMING OF AGE
Considering its wealth of details and the intimacy of its first-person voice, it's hard to believe that The Eight Mountains by Paolo Cognetti is a work of fiction and not a memoir.
The novel's narrator, Pietro, is from a middle-class family that holidays in the foothills of the Dolomites along Italy's northeastern border. Here he meets Bruno, a cow herder from a poor family, and the two boys form a tight bond. Like Pietro, the author divides his time between Milan and his cabin in the Italian Alps. Because of this, mountaineering, the outdoors and homebuilding are described throughout The Eight Mountains with such specificity that these sections are part instruction manual, part diary: "Four screws were necessary for each bracket, which meant thirty-two holes in all. According to Bruno these numbers were crucial: the whole viability of the roof depended on them." Descriptions of nature are especially delightful: "I startled roe deer foraging in the abandoned pastures; bolt upright with their ears at attention, they would look at me in alarm for an instant, then flee to the woods like thieves."
The Eight Mountains evokes a hunger and passion for the outdoors that is entwined with the boys' enduring friendship and their bond with Pietro's father. (Pietro often feels that rugged Bruno is the son his aloof, intense father always longed for.) This is juxtaposed with an aching sense of melancholy when Pietro's and Bruno's lives unspool in adulthood, as money concerns and failed relationships take hold.
A literary sensation in Italy, this isn't so much a page-turner as a novel that draws you in, gets into your soul and never leaves.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Vasishta, Jeff. "THE EIGHT MOUNTAINS." BookPage, Apr. 2018, p. 20. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532528579/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ec126e91. Accessed 22 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A532528579
The Eight Mountains
Publishers Weekly. 265.2 (Jan. 8, 2018): p38.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Eight Mountains
Paolo Cognetti, trans. from the Italian by Simon Carnell and Erica Segre. Atria, $24
(224p) ISBN 978-1-5011-6988-5
Written with the reflection and sensitivity of a memoir, Cognetti's meditative debut explores the intertwined lives of two young men from opposite ends of the social spectrum. Pietro Guasti is 11 years old and contending with his chemist father's demanding mountain-climbing regimen when he befriends Bruno Guglielmina, a cow herder his age living in the shadow of Italy's Monte Rosa. Though the two become close confidants, Pietro, who has worldly ambitions, believes that the more parochial and rugged Bruno would have made a "more suitable" son for his father. When a tragic incident that shaped Pietro's father comes to light, Pietro senses further that he and Bruno "were actually living inside my father's dream." Cognetti takes his novel's title from a Nepalese legend about the different varieties of human experience, and the story illustrates how Pietro and Bruno, despite the dissimilar paths their lives take, can be understood as different sides of the same soul. His nuanced depiction of his two main characters and the camaraderie they share gives his spiritually uplifting tale gravity and texture. (Mar.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Eight Mountains." Publishers Weekly, 8 Jan. 2018, p. 38. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A524502953/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ef379b1d. Accessed 22 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A524502953
Growing Up And Stepping Out
Megan Ogrady
Vogue. 208.3 (Mar. 2018): p306.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Conde Nast Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Conde Nast Publications, Inc.
http://www.style.com/vogue/
Full Text:
Byline: Megan O'Grady.
Growing Up and Stepping Out
Spring's most satisfying books tell stories of evolution, personal and public.
The Eight Mountains
A quietly defiant, and defining, friendship is forged between two boys of different backgrounds-one rural, one urbane-in Italian novelist Paolo Cognetti's crystalline, Dolomite-set debut, The Eight Mountains (Atria), a slim novel of startling expansion that subtly echoes its setting.
The Female Persuasion
No novel could feel more prescient in the #MeToo moment than Meg Wolitzer's The Female Persuasion (Riverhead), the story of a pair of idealistic young women, college students who bond after an attempted assault on campus only to find their attempts to carve out meaningful lives derailed along with their friendship. Though occasionally slipping into caricature, Wolitzer's ultra-readable latest illuminates the oceanic complexity of growing up female and ambitious-and reveals the author's substantial insight into the tangles of gender and power.
The Sparsholt Affair
A secret history of art and desire-and its effect on an iconoclastic English family-is at the heart of Alan Hollinghurst's The Sparsholt Affair (Knopf), a novel shaped by the keen understanding of how we live amid the repercussions of the previous generation's actions.
Laura & Emma
Single parenting is far from unusual these days, but for a privileged Manhattan daughter who finds herself unexpectedly pregnant, raising a child alone is pearl-clutchingly radical in Kate Greathead's wryly observed, 1980s-set first novel, Laura & Emma (Simon & Schuster).
Speak No Evil
A Tinder account upends the comfortable prep-school life for the American-born, Harvard-bound son of conservative Nigerian immigrants in Uzodinma Iweala's second novel, Speak No Evil (Harper), a timely story of friendship, secrets, and consequences.
Girls Burn Brighter
A searing portrait of what feminism looks like in much of the world, Shobha Rao's first novel, Girls Burn Brighter (Flatiron), follows an incandescent friendship between two South Indian teens who, after they are separated by a terrible crime, continue to influence each other as they defy tradition and expectation, trading security for terrifyingly uncharted paths in America.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Ogrady, Megan. "Growing Up And Stepping Out." Vogue, Mar. 2018, p. 306. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A528374072/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=7926699e. Accessed 22 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A528374072
Paolo Cognetti: The Eight Mountains
Michele Levy
World Literature Today. 92.2 (March-April 2018): p69+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 University of Oklahoma
http://www.worldliteraturetoday.com
Full Text:
Paolo Cognetti
The Eight Mountains
Trans. Simon Carnell & Erica Segre. New York. Atria. 2018. 224 pages.
With over thirty foreign rights sales, this first novel has won the 2017 Strega, Strega Giovani, and the Prix Médicis étranger. Beyond its mountain setting and understated portraits of a dysfunctional family and a complicated friendship, The Eight Mountains constitutes a moving meditation on man in time and nature. In its epigraph, Coleridge's Ancient Mariner exhorts the Wedding Guest to love all creatures, but this novel more closely echoes early Wordsworth.
The sotto voce of Paolo Cognetti's first-person narrator, Pietro Guasti, a rootless documentary filmmaker, imbues his tripartite history with nostalgia--the bittersweet pain of homesickness that can bring insight. Before part 1, an unnamed chapter hints at the Guasti "foundational story," which haunts Pietro's family like the mariner's albatross. His father, Giovanni, survives an Alpine avalanche that kills his best friend, Piero. When he and Piero's sister wed, her family ostracizes them. Relocated to Milan, they summer in a tiny Alpine village, Grana, where Giovanni transforms from brooding loner to energetic mountaineer and six-year-old Pietro demands to hike with him.
Part 1, "The Mountain of Childhood," details the many summers after Pietro meets Bruno, a local lad. As they roam the mountains and hike with Giovanni, Bruno draws closer to the family, until his brutish father takes him off to learn building. After Pietro, disturbed by his parents' growing estrangement, breaks with Giovanni at sixteen, he meets Bruno once more.
Part 2, "The House of Reconciliation," begins seventeen years later, when Giovanni's sudden death thwarts Pietro's plan to reconnect. In Grana with his mother, Pietro hikes his father's favorite trails to know him better. Still close to the elder Guastis, Bruno helps rebuild Pietro's unexpected legacy, an isolated ruin high on the mountain. Pietro shares the house, Barma , with Bruno, as he thinks Giovanni intended.
In part 3, "A Friend in Winter," Bruno's refusal to leave the mountain costs him his farm, lover, and child. On the last of several anxious trips from Nepal to Grana, Pietro finds Bruno alone in snow-bound Barma . An avalanche teaches Pietro the dangers of Alpine winters, but Bruno rejects all his pleas to descend.
Majestic but brutal, resisting man's efforts to tame them, these mountains embody time and impermanence. Abandoned homesteads dot meadows. Farms untended soon revert to pasture. Nature will reclaim Barma . The Alps and Dolomites are old, the Himalayas young. Glaciers are "the snow of winters past." And many, including Giovanni, hike to remember their youth and ponder their lives.
At last Pietro understands a Himalayan proverb: like his father, he toured the eight mountains while Bruno dwelt on the summit, that difference having shaped their lives and vision. Forsaking his childhood mountain, since roaming the others "is all that remains for those who ... on the first and highest mountain have lost a friend," Pietro has come, like Wordsworth, "to look on nature not as in the hour / Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes / The still, sad music of humanity."
Michele Levy
North Carolina A&T University
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Levy, Michele. "Paolo Cognetti: The Eight Mountains." World Literature Today, vol. 92, no. 2, 2018, p. 69+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A529356897/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=7f36e632. Accessed 22 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A529356897
The Eight Mountains by Paolo Cognetti review – friends in high places
A boy bonds with a local while holidaying in Italy’s mountains in a thoughtful, if homespun, coming-of-age story
Ben East
Sun 18 Mar 2018 05.00 EDT
Last modified on Wed 21 Mar 2018 19.48 EDT
Autumn in the Alps, where the young narrator of The Eight Mountains spends his summers
Autumn in the Alps, where the young narrator of The Eight Mountains spends his summers. Photograph: Alamy
“Whatever destiny may be, it resides in the mountains that tower over us,” muses Pietro, the pensive 11-year-old narrator of The Eight Mountains, as he begins a long coming-of-age journey in the foothills of Italy’s Monte Rosa. This short line says a lot about how Paolo Cognetti’s thoughtful yet sometimes overripe novel operates.
Young Pietro’s initial reflections about life on holiday in the mountains, where he spends his summers, his relationship with his father, and his friendship with Bruno, the cow-herding son of a local stonemason, teeter on the brink of being overly mystical. But The Eight Mountains is written in such arrestingly simple language – you can almost feel the Italian phrasing in the translation from Simon Carnell and Erica Segre – that it’s impossible not to be gradually sucked into the peaks and valleys of Pietro’s life.
The Eight Mountains, an award-winning bestseller in Cognetti’s native Italy, is a story of relationships – not just between people, but with the mountains around the village of Grana. Pietro’s father isn’t just in love with the Monte Rosa – he’s obsessed by their scale and grandeur (“like arriving from the mountains of men to find yourself in the mountains of giants”). But Pietro doesn’t share his dad’s fixation with exploring mountain paths, happening across wild goats or bivouacking under the stars, and starts to forgo joining him on trips up to the glacier. He prefers, instead, to climb rocks, hang out in the local village or explore ruined mountain shacks. It loosens their bond until an unfortunate event means their differences can never be resolved.
Much like his characters, Paolo Cognetti divides his time between Milan and a cabin in the hills, and The Eight Mountains takes on the quality of a memoir as Pietro returns to Grana as a man to work out not just what his father means to him, but how the landscape has affected his life and friendships. “If it was such a paradise,” he wonders, “then why did we not stay and live up there?”
But though Pietro has travelled across the world, Bruno has never left Grana, and it’s fascinating to watch Pietro grapple with the push and pull of enduring friendships; how they work and what they mean. The perceived simplicity of Bruno’s life is alluring: when the pals begin to renovate an alpine hut, Bruno tells Pietro not to worry about how long it will take. “So what should I think about?” asks Pietro. “About today,” comes the reply. “Look what a beautiful day it is.”
Such homespun philosophy – of which there is plenty – is an acquired taste. But there’s something about the vertiginous setting that lends itself to this kind of contemplation. Cognetti captures the elation and melancholy that comes with reaching a spectacular summit, only to realise the minuscule part we play in the panorama of life.
• The Eight Mountains by Paolo Cognetti is published by Harvill Secker (£12.99). To order a copy for £11.04 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
The Eight Mountains by Paolo Cognetti
FICTION
Author:
Paolo Cognetti
Translator:
Simon Carnell and Erica Segre
The cover to The Eight Mountains by Paolo CognettiNew York. Atria. 2018. 224 pages.
With over thirty foreign rights sales, this first novel has won the 2017 Strega, Strega Giovani, and the Prix Médicis étranger. Beyond its mountain setting and understated portraits of a dysfunctional family and a complicated friendship, The Eight Mountains constitutes a moving meditation on man in time and nature. In its epigraph, Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner exhorts the Wedding Guest to love all creatures, but this novel more closely echoes early Wordsworth.
The sotto voce of Paolo Cognetti’s first-person narrator, Pietro Guasti, a rootless documentary filmmaker, imbues his tripartite history with nostalgia—the bittersweet pain of homesickness that can bring insight. Before part 1, an unnamed chapter hints at the Guasti “foundational story,” which haunts Pietro’s family like the mariner’s albatross. His father, Giovanni, survives an Alpine avalanche that kills his best friend, Piero. When he and Piero’s sister wed, her family ostracizes them. Relocated to Milan, they summer in a tiny Alpine village, Grana, where Giovanni transforms from brooding loner to energetic mountaineer and six-year-old Pietro demands to hike with him.
Part 1, “The Mountain of Childhood,” details the many summers after Pietro meets Bruno, a local lad. As they roam the mountains and hike with Giovanni, Bruno draws closer to the family, until his brutish father takes him off to learn building. After Pietro, disturbed by his parents’ growing estrangement, breaks with Giovanni at sixteen, he meets Bruno once more.
Part 2, “The House of Reconciliation,” begins seventeen years later, when Giovanni’s sudden death thwarts Pietro’s plan to reconnect. In Grana with his mother, Pietro hikes his father’s favorite trails to know him better. Still close to the elder Guastis, Bruno helps rebuild Pietro’s unexpected legacy, an isolated ruin high on the mountain. Pietro shares the house, Barma, with Bruno, as he thinks Giovanni intended.
In part 3, “A Friend in Winter,” Bruno’s refusal to leave the mountain costs him his farm, lover, and child. On the last of several anxious trips from Nepal to Grana, Pietro finds Bruno alone in snow-bound Barma. An avalanche teaches Pietro the dangers of Alpine winters, but Bruno rejects all his pleas to descend.
Majestic but brutal, resisting man’s efforts to tame them, these mountains embody time and impermanence. Abandoned homesteads dot meadows. Farms untended soon revert to pasture. Nature will reclaim Barma. The Alps and Dolomites are old, the Himalayas young. Glaciers are “the snow of winters past.” And many, including Giovanni, hike to remember their youth and ponder their lives.
At last Pietro understands a Himalayan proverb: like his father, he toured the eight mountains while Bruno dwelt on the summit, that difference having shaped their lives and vision. Forsaking his childhood mountain, since roaming the others “is all that remains for those who . . . on the first and highest mountain have lost a friend,” Pietro has come, like Wordsworth, “to look on nature not as in the hour / Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes / The still, sad music of humanity.”
Michele Levy
North Carolina A&T University
Paolo Cognetti–THE EIGHT MOUNTAINS
Apr 22nd, 2018 by mary
Note: This novel was WINNER of the Strega Prize, Italy’s highest honor, when it was published in Italy in 2017.
“I peered over the rock…I did not know what I was supposed to see: beyond the rock the river formed a small waterfall and a shadowy pool, probably knee-deep. The surface of the water was unsettled, agitated by the churning fall. At the edges floated a finger’s depth of foam, and a large trapped branch sticking out diagonally had collected grass and sodden leaves around itself. It wasn’t much of a spectacle, only water that had run there from the mountain. And yet it was spellbinding: I don’t know why.”—Pietro Guasti, age 12.
cover 8 mountainsIn 1984 twelve-year-old Pietro Guasti and his parents arrive in Grana, a quiet mountain village in northern Italy between Turin and Milan. Both parents love climbing the mountains, and though Pietro’s mother, a former nurse, does not enjoy climbing beyond the three-thousand foot mark, his father, who is at heart a loner, routinely climbs to the peaks of the higher mountains which attract him. Grana, a tiny farming village, has been losing its population, but it is in the foothills of Monte Rosa, a well-known climbing location, which makes it attractive as a vacation site, with an atmosphere far different from Pietro’s home in Milan. Pietro becomes fast friends almost instantly with Bruno Guglielmina, a local youth his age who is in charge of his family’s cows. Together they explore the mountain, the abandoned farms, a former school, and other places testifying to the decline of the village economy but fascinating for the images they conjure for the boys.
Author Paolo Cognetti
Author Paolo Cognetti
The quotation which opens this review is Pietro’s reaction to an experience he has in the mountains with Bruno, a place which Pietro does not recognize, at first, for the “miracle” that it is. As he stares at the water, however, Pietro suddenly realizes that “there was something moving beneath it…four tapering shadows with their snouts facing into the current, with only their tails moving slowly from side to side.” What Pietro finds so remarkable is that “we were further down the valley than they were, which was why they had not noticed us yet.” The fish – trout – were hunting, giving the lie to the idea that fish swim with the current, something Bruno knew already because he had observed it. This very early scene is in many ways symbolic of this novel itself, a consummately quiet, peaceful novel in which nothing much “happens.” Yet it is magical, even for those of us who do not fish for trout or climb mountains, a novel in which the author follows Pietro and Bruno from the age of twelve until they are in their early forties.
On his first climb with his father, Pietro is excited to see the horns of ibexes, watching them, even as he suffered from altitude sickness.
On his first climb with his father, Pietro is excited to see ibexes watching them, even as he is miserable from altitude sickness.
The reader comes to know Pietro and Bruno both separately and as members of their very different families, and as their lives continue to overlap in summers and, later, through Pietro’s separate visits to the village, their mutual respect, even love, for each other is a constant theme which provides a kind of anchoring stability even when they move in very different directions. A key component of their relationship, at first, is the presence of Pietro’s father, a hardworking, conscientious man with a desk job, a man who reveals little of himself to his son Pietro, but who has an instinctive connection with Bruno. A casual invitation to Bruno to join Pietro and his father for Pietro’s first big climb up the mountain becomes symbolic, as the father, rigidly focused on reaching the top of this 3000-foot peak, finds himself drawn more closely to Bruno, whose physical size and abilities make him a great, if untutored, climber, while his own son Pietro soon finds himself suffering the agony of altitude sickness, which he is afraid to reveal.
Monte Rosa, the mountain closest to Pietro's family in Grana.
Monte Rosa, the mountain closest to Pietro’s family in Grana.
Two summers later, Pietro’s mother is waging war with Bruno’s family trying to ensure that Bruno, who has little interest in schooling, gets an education, and a confrontation with Bruno’s father ensues. Pietro’s own decision to stop participating in further camping experiences provides emotional blows to his father, who continues to climb on his own. Pietro begins short term rock climbing instead, with some of the wealthy tourists who have come to the mountain for vacations, and his father is devastated by his participation in what he regards as a lesser “social activity.” As he leaves Grana that summer, Pietro also leaves Bruno, and does not return for fourteen years. When he does return at age thirty-one, he reveals that he has moved from Milan to Turin to be on his own and lives in a studio flat. He is earning a living as a documentary filmmaker, is still single, and is still alienated from his father.
Turin, to which Pietro moved when his family life in Milan became too stifling. Grana is located between Milan and Turin.
Turin, to which Pietro moved when his family life in Milan became too stifling. Grana is located between Milan and Turin.
Eventually, a special bequest from his father leads Pietro back to Grana and to Bruno, now a builder. When Bruno persuades Pietro to stay for the summer to help him rebuild an old house, Pietro decides to stay, gradually getting into better physical shape, climbing the mountain again and revisiting special places. At the end of summer, Pietro moves on to Asia, to make a film about the most dangerous mountain of all, Annapurna in the Himalayas, while Bruno stays in Grana with a woman who loves him. In the Himalayas, Pietro meets an old Nepalese man who provides a much-needed perspective about life, including his own: “The [old Nepalese] man picked up a small stick and drew a circle with it on the ground. Then, inside the circle he [drew]…a wheel with eight spokes [a mandala]….We believe that at the centre of the earth there is a tremendously high mountain, Sumeru,” he says. “Around Sumeru there are eight mountains and eight seas. This is the world for us…We ask who has learned the most, the one who has been to all eight mountains, or the one who has reached the summit of Sumeru?” As the novel winds its way to its conclusion, the answer to this mystical question becomes clearer.
Annapurna, the Himalayan mountain which has led to the greatest number of deaths of all.
Annapurna, the Himalayan mountain which has led to the greatest number of deaths of all.
The action throughout is quiet and thought-provoking, leaving the reader to sort through the various subplots and what they mean to both Pietro and Bruno as they try to find success – not financial success, but personal, emotional success – a sense of achievement based on effort and care for others. In this, the novel, which some refer to as a coming-of-age novel, expands its themes and its characters as some face a future which they may not have been expecting. Ultimately, Pietro has learned, unexpectedly from his father, that there may be certain mountains to which one can never return, and that visiting the eight mountains is all that remains for some. A surprising and very satisfying novel certain to appeal to those who appreciate understated, leisurely writing with much of value to say, and book clubs should love it.
Photos. The author’s photo appears on http://www.lecturissime.com
Pietro is excited when he sees an ibex while climbing, despite the fact that he is suffering from altitude sickness, which he does not want to tell his father for fear of disappointing him. http://www.cicukteb.com/
The massif of Monte Rosa faces them when they reach the summit: https://www.alpineinterface.com
Grana is located about halfway between Milan, where Pietro lived as a child, and Turin, shown here, to which he moved as an adult. https://www.10thingstodoandsee.com
Pietro plans to do a documentary about Annapurna in the Himalayas, the most dangerous mountain climbing experience of all. https://en.wikipedia.org
THE EIGHT MOUNTAINS
REVIEW. PHOTOS. Book Club Suggestions, Coming-of-age, Exploration, Mountain Climbing, Italy, Literary, Psychological study
Written by: Paolo Cognetti
Published by: Atria
Date Published: 03/20/2018
ISBN: 978-1501169885
Available in: Ebook Hardcover
The Eight Mountains: Paolo Cognetti
December 22, 2017
The Eight Mountains
Paolo Cognetti
★★★½
Mountains exert a powerful fascination on the modern mind. They offer freedom, escape, wilderness, the shrugging-off of civilisation. They promise an elemental battle between humanity and nature. And they hold out the prospect of possession: peaks to be claimed and conquered. In this restrained and elegant novel, Paolo Cognetti tells the story of Pietro, a young boy from Milan whose life will be shaped by a childhood friendship formed in the high valleys of the Italian Alps. A tale of obsession, of fathers and sons, of friendship and of belonging, this is a poignant glimpse of a fading world.
Pietro’s parents met through a shared love of climbing and he grows up surrounded by the folklore of the mountains. It’s only during their alpine holidays that his difficult, short-tempered father seems to relax, as if returning to his natural habitat, and when Pietro is twelve, the family rents a little cabin in the hill-village of Grana. Here, Pietro’s father goes off on epic solo marches up into the mountains, savouring the clarity of the air and the challenges of the nearby glacier; Pietro’s mother turns with contentment to a simple rustic life; and Pietro himself goes out to explore and have fantasy adventures. Here, one day, he encounters Bruno Guglielmina, a local boy who herds his family’s cows and is similarly starved of friendship. From self-conscious beginnings, a close friendship develops: an almost fraternal bond that ties the two boys together.
The years pass, and each summer Pietro’s family returns to Grana. As he grows older, he begins to go walking with his father – and Bruno joins them as often as he can. Cognetti traces the impact of these simple, happy days throughout the boys’ lives, using them as a way to illuminate Pietro’s uneasy relationship with his father and his growing sense of his own place in the world. The book isn’t a narrative so much as a series of vignettes, showing us not only the boys growing into men, and their changing friendship, but also the changes in Grana itself. In emphasising the vast eternity of the mountains, the book illuminates the way that an ancient lifestyle can begin slowly to shift – and then, with the force and suddenness of an avalanche, crumble away.
I’ve seen the book compared to Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, but I’m not sure how far I would agree with this – beyond the fact, of course, that it focuses on a long-term Italian friendship. Cognetti’s book is more detached, more dreamlike, a tale of the mountains as much as of the boys themselves. There are times when it seems to drift rather than having the dynamism of Ferrante’s story. Yet it does share that elegiac sense of nostalgia: a picture of an Italy which is all the more moving because we know that it has been lost forever.
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I received this book from the publisher via Netgalley in return for a fair and honest review
The Eight Mountains review: An arduous ascent into adulthood
Paolo Cognetti’s coming-of-age in the Alps story is vividly rendered and wonderfully lucid
Paolo Cognetti: The Eight Mountains has won multiple awards in Italy and is his first novel to be translated into English
Paolo Cognetti: The Eight Mountains has won multiple awards in Italy and is his first novel to be translated into English
Sarah Gilmartin
Sat, Mar 17, 2018, 06:00
First published:
Sat, Mar 17, 2018, 06:00
Book Title:
The Eight Mountains
ISBN-13:
978-1787300149
Author:
Paulo Cognetti (translated by Simon Carnell and Erica Segre)
Publisher:
Harvill Secker
Guideline Price:
£12.99
The peaks and troughs of our journey through life get a fitting backdrop in Paolo Cognetti’s debut The Eight Mountains. Midway through the novel, the narrator, Pietro, pauses in typical fashion to reflect on his experiences of trekking through the Alps as a child with his fanatical mountaineer father. “Is it much further?” is the forbidden question, as much a summation of the father’s unyielding character as it is a metaphor for the lives of the book’s central characters.
An epigraph from Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner establishes the novel’s overriding theme of the impact of nature on the development of the individual. Now in his late 30s, Pietro looks back on a childhood and adolescence split between Milan during term time and the mountainous village of Grana in northern Italy every summer. An enduring friendship with a young mountain shepherd, Bruno, is billed as the heart of the novel but The Eight Mountains is in many ways more preoccupied with the bond between father and son.
Although astute observations on human behaviour carry the novel to its close, it is Pietro’s troubled relationship with his withdrawn father that makes for the most absorbing part of the book. It is a familiar dynamic, not least from a late-20th century Irish perspective: a proud, taciturn father attuned to the outside world and his indoorsy, thoughtful son struggling to keep up. The rules are made clear: “One, establish a pace and keep to it without stopping; two, no talking; three, when faced with a fork in the way, always choose the uphill route.”
Penitential
There is something penitential in the father’s desire to scale the most difficult, glacial parts of the mountains, and the doggedness of his pursuit is beautifully depicted from his son’s perspective. This is further brought to life by the introduction of Bruno, a more natural heir to the father, and the relationship, unsullied by blood, that Pietro watches unfold before him in the icy atmosphere of the Alps: “I still had in my eyes the image I had seen of them there, so close and triumphant, like father and son.”
In the hands of a lesser writer, this could give way to bitterness, but Pietro’s contemplative tone brings the mature and generous assessment of hindsight.
Captivating scenes of severe nausea and near-tragedies are mixed with stunning descriptions of the landscape: “Now the fog-filled valleys below us and the sky was clear, the colour of mother-of-pearl, with the last stars slowly fading out as the light spread.” Cognetti is a sensual writer who uses his gifts to vividly render the self-sufficient lives of the villages, “the smell of the stable, of hay, curdled milk, damp earth and woodsmoke which has always been for me, from that moment onwards, the smell of the mountains.”
The power of nature to transform the individual, for good and for bad, is seen through each of the characters. Pietro’s mother favours the woodlands and meadows before the mountains, reflecting her easy nature and role as family pacifier. His father, meanwhile, prefers wildlife to people, unable to communicate with his loved ones the way he can with an immovable mountain. The boys and he make their treks “in mute private communion with our own exertions”. The theme of loss is starkly felt in the novel, particularly with Pietro’s regret at not figuring out a way to understand his father before it was too late.
Autonomous beings
The locals also struggle with relationships. Bruno and his mother are autonomous beings, but each ultimately loses something in their isolation with nature. One interesting observation notes how differently the pair are treated in their desire for solitude. A man’s retreat is acceptable, even admirable; a woman’s is an affront to the community and blamed on illness.
An editor and novelist from Milan, Cognetti divides his time between New York and a cabin 2,000 feet up the Alps. The Eight Mountains has won multiple awards in Italy and is his first novel to be translated into English. There is something of his countryman Primo Levi in the wonderfully lucid sentences and contemplative tone of his prose. As Pietro looks at Bruno and his former girlfriend Lara settling down together, he finds that his life “seemed to me to be only partly that of a grown man, and partly still like that of an adolescent”.
The novel flags in the final third as the father fades into the background and random anecdotes about Pietro’s travels fail to fill in the gaps. It is nonetheless a beautifully crafted piece of writing, whose inevitable conclusion movingly sees the past repeat itself. Amid a backdrop of physical exertion, Cognetti has written a leisurely, reflective story about a journey over arduous terrain: “Finding your way is easy if you have a rope above your head: it’s something else entirely when the rope is at your feet.”
Sat, Mar 17, 2018, 06:00