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The Eight Mountains by Paolo Cognetti: book review


The Eight Mountains (2018) is set in a small village, Grana, in the Dolomite Mountains in the north-east of Italy from 1984 to 2014.


It is about two ten-year-old boys whose love of mountain climbing brings them together every summer holidays. 


The narrator is Pietro, a city boy from Milan. His father takes him mountain climbing. There he meets Bruno, an adventurous local boy who knows the mountains well. ‘Going into the mountains with Bruno had nothing to do with the peaks … we would at some point, known only to him, leave the beaten track and continue along other routes … it was a mystery to me how he got his bearings.’ Pietro and his father had a paper map; Bruno had an internal map. Pietro walked slow; Bruno walked fast.


From each other, they learn what it’s like to live in the city or in the countryside – their routines, challenges, and dreams for the future. Together, they enjoy a friendship based upon a love of nature and freedom. Until they turn seventeen.


From the age of seventeen, the visits stop. Pietro studies, works, and travels the globe. When his 62-year-old father dies in 2004, and Pietro is 31, never married and alone, he knows he needs to reconnect with the mountains.


The eight mountains refers to the story of the man Pietro meets in Nepal in the Himalayas: ‘at the centre of the earth there is a tremendously high mountain, Sumeru. Around Sumeru there are eight mountains and eight seas … We ask: who has learned most, the one who has been to all eight mountains, or the one who has reached the summit of Sumeru?’


Pietro and Bruno reconnect. Pietro renovates the cottage in Grana that once belonged to his father – ‘a ruin to rebuild.’ His mother arrives with her long-time female friend. Here, Pietro comes to really know his mother, and the real life of Bruno, who was never close to his father.


Pietro also learns more about his own father – his ‘two’ fathers: the father from the city and the father he became every time they arrived in the mountains. He learns the difference between duty and passion. 

 

Can a childhood friendship last the test of time? From annual visits that commenced in childhood to longer-term connections now that Pietro is living in the same village as Bruno, there are bound to be disagreements, right? If Pietro is the one who has visited eight mountains, and Bruno is the one who has climbed the local summit, who has learned most? 


This is a wonderful story: part memoir, part fictional. It examines father-son and mother-son relationships, a long childhood friendship that brings other relationships into focus, and the love of nature that tests true love and life. 










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MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author  of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce  (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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