Le otto montagne, Paolo Cognetti

Winner of the Premio Strega 2017, Le otto montagne is not a love story, yet it is a love story. It is the complex love between two adults who are parents. It is the love their child struggles to find in his mother and father. It is the love Pietro learns to recognize in his friendship with Bruno, and above all, an immense love for the mountains.

Pietro, a solitary boy from Milan, and Bruno, the son of farmers from a small village in the Valle d’Aosta at the foot of Monte Rosa: between them develops a very strong bond that will last a lifetime, despite their different origins and social backgrounds. The search for life and for the people within it becomes a walk among granite slopes, the scent of logs burning in the snow, and squared stones alternating with green pastures. It is a praise of lakes, streams, meadows, and rocky fields. It is a simple story, without heroes or antiheroes: only men living within a microcosm. Yet these simply human figures awaken the complex simplicity of the most solid friendship, a light and attentive love for places that are truly home. The contrast between micro and macro, between locus amoenus and locus horridus, the distance between searching and finding, all melt away like snow at the arrival of summer.

You will close these pages understanding that being simply human is perhaps the one thing each of us should ultimately strive to be.

edited: Emilia S.