The eight mountains : a novel /

"The Eight Mountains" is an old-fashioned ' novel in the best sense of the word. With gorgeously understated, unhurried prose, Cognetti crafts the story of an unlikely friendship between a city boy named Pietro and a young cow herder, Bruno, who lives in the Alpine mountains where the members of Pietro's family spend their vacations. You can feel the cycles of nature as the narrative unfolds. At one point, Pietro's father points out mountain water that may have come from snow that fell a hundred years earlier. The language of nature is the only one in which Pietro's father is fluent. Pietro will spend most of the novel trying to decipher it, and with it the identity of the man he barely knew - a man, in truth, who finds it easier to be a father to Bruno than to his actual son. Cognetti's mix of patient observation and sharp insight into the natural world recalls the mastery of Helen Macdonald's "H Is for Hawk." "In the night sky some white shapes emitted a kind of aura," Pietro notes on a return to the Aosta Valley after his father's death, "ft took me a moment to realize that they were not clouds: They were mountains still covered in snow.... In the city the spring was already advanced, and 1 was no longer accustomed to the fact that to go up high is to go back a season." Even though Pietro is solitary and remote, one can't help caring for him. The brilliant writing helps, but there's something more: His love for nature is profound, a sign that deep currents swirl beneath his crotchety surface, pulling the reader into the vortex of his emotions. Carnell and Segre capture the tone of Cognetti's calm descriptions of nature, setting them in tense contrast with Pietro's discordant thoughts. "The Eight Mountains" ends with Pietro traveling through the Himalayas, recalling his youth in Italy and his friendship with Bruno before concluding: "In certain lives there are mountains to which we may never return."

Pietro is a lonely city boy with parents who share a mutual love for the mountains and little else. When his family begins renting a house in the Alps during the summers, Pietro meets Bruno, an idealistic local boy who finds adventure in the ruins of his village. Together, during those summers of childhood and adolescence, they explore the lonely landscape of the mountains with its meadows, rivers, and snowy peaks. As adults, their paths diverge as Pietro goes on to travel the world and Bruno stays where he has always been, continuously building his life as a man of the mountains. Despite the distance and sparse communication, their friendship never fades. As Pietro comes to realize during his travels, sometimes everything can change, but there are some things like friendship that can be depended on to stay the same. Winner of the Strega Prize, Italy's highest literary honor, Cognetti's novel elegantly paints the terrifyingly beautiful landscape of the mountains at the heart of a brotherly friendship that proves to transcend anything.--Park, Emily Copyright 2018 Booklist

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.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.