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Paolo Cognetti


In the last couple of weeks I read a pair of books by Paolo Cognetti, a contemporary Italian author.  The first was called The Eight Mountains and the second was a recent memoir called The Wild Boy.  They were closely related, and reading the second right after the first showed how much of Cognetti's own experience had gone into the novel.

I bought the first a year ago, while I was teaching in London.  I don't even remember now where I came across it initially, but something had made me think I would enjoy it.  And in London--this would not have happened in Houghton!--I happened across both it and its Italian original, Le Otto Montagne, so I bought them both, thinking it might help me try to read a little Italian, though in fact I don't have time for that.

The novel, which won a prize in Italy and has now been widely translated, is a story about nature and friendship, as the narrator relates his experiences growing up in the mountains and then returning as an adult to visit a childhood friend and resume their friendship.  The story is well told and makes one feel like taking a trip to the Alps.  That isn't possible right now, of course, but you could travel vicariously with the help of Cognetti's novel.

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