Winner of the Strega Prize, Italy’s highest literary honor, this coming-of-age novel about a young man from Milan who spends summers in the Italian Alps muses on the effects of the mountain landscape on one's life and relationships.
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 ... this isn’t so much a page-turner as a novel that draws you in, gets into your soul and never leaves.
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...that it’s impossible not to be gradually sucked into the peaks and valleys of Pietro’s life ... 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.
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.
