The Eight Mountains

Paolo Cognetti

I spent my "junior year abroad" (six months, actually) in Florence.  We were given frequent periods of free time to explore post-war Italy on our own.  During the first free period, most of us went to Rome, some to other cities.  But a kid named Fred ("Federico" to our Italian language teacher) went to a place most of us had never heard of -- the Val d'Aosta. 

Aosta is an Alpine valley in the far northwest corner of Italy, hugging the southern slopes of Monte Rosa -- opposite Zermatt which is on the Swiss side of the mountain.  This was 1961, before the outdoors and backpacking craze had hit American youth.  Aosta seemed like an odd  place to visit, at least for a kid's first experience in Italy, but Fred was a quiet, friendly, clear-eyed, and patently decent young man.  If anyone in our group was meant for a remote Alpine valley, it was he.*

Paolo Cognetti writes about a small fictitious Aosta village, Grana, in his novel, The Eight Mountains -- the first of his writings to be translated from Italian to English.  It has won awards across Europe.  As have its English translators, who have given us a translation that is in itself a work of art.

Eleven-year-old Pietro, his chemist father, and his health worker mother live in Milan.  His mother is outgoing and cheerful, his father is precise, strict, and introverted.  Pietro, shy and sensitive, combines their personalities.

In 1984, they rent and rehabilitate a derelict summer home in Grana.  Pietro encounters Bruno, a boy his age and equally silent, who works tending cows on the neighboring property.  Pietro's mother brings the two taciturn lads together, and without making a fuss about it they become best friends -- a friendship that continues throughout their adult lives.

Pietro's father and mother both love the mountains.  The mother loves the quiet pleasures of woodlands and pastures, but the father is obsessively devoted to climbing summits far above the tree line.  Pietro feels his father cares little for the scenery -- only achieving the summit matters. 

The father takes the son with him on some of these expeditions.  The son is proud of his developing abilities, but he is prone to altitude sickness and secretly dreads each climb.  Achieving the summit doesn't mean to Pietro what it does to his father.

It was more of a relief than a cause for elation.  There was no reward awaiting us up there; apart from the fact that we could climb no further, there was nothing really special about the summit.

They take Bruno with them, and Pietro is both happy and a bit jealous that Bruno seems a more likely son to Pietro's father than does Pietro himself.

Cognetti's novel is a story of a boy's fraught relationship with his father, and a story of a friendship between two boys that survives despite great differences in their background and in their experiences as adolescents and young men.

The novel features yet another character, a critical character -- the mountain itself.  The novel revolves around the father's obsession with the mountain, around Pietro's love of the lower slopes -- the lakes, the woods, the streams, the paths and slopes, the sunbaked scree -- and around Bruno's intimate knowledge of his very small world of mountain and pasture, and his successful efforts to initiate Pietro into his world.  The mountain above Grana is the fulcrum on which the lives of both Pietro and his father balance -- while spending their early summers at Grana, and long afterwards when Pietro has moved far away, seeking fulfillment in the Himalayas of Nepal.  It is the tie that holds Pietro and Bruno together, and the obstacle that pushes Pietro and his father apart.

Pietro's father in his commitment to his work and to climbing the mountains has lost -- or perhaps never had -- the ability to listen to the people close to him, to understand that their needs were different from his own.  Pietro has inherited to a lesser degree this aloof quality.  As a young man, he is unable to commit for any period of time to any one woman.  He watches happily as the girlfriend  closest to him finally gives up, joins Bruno and has Bruno's daughter.

Like his father, Pietro hates any change in the Grana region.  Grana -- like the Westmorland of Jane Gardam's The Hollow Land -- was a once-prosperous and well-populated area that had lost most of its population as farming and mining stopped being economically viable.  The land  was littered with ruined farm buildings and huts, tunnels and bits of mining equipment.  The region was enjoying in places a bit of a revival from tourism and winter skiing -- but a revival that Pietro, like his father, hated.

Cognetti's writing is a hymn to nature, both to the lower mountain slopes, and especially to the mountain heights.  He describes the smallest details of climbing, the pains, the difficulties, the joys, the  terrain, and the trees and plants, as only a person who is intimately familiar with climbing can do.  For mountain hikers, the novel revives happy memories; for someone who hasn't hiked or climbed, it may encourage some eager experimentation.

Pietro's father dies of an unexpected heart attack at age 62.  Pietro then learns of the tragedy in his father's past -- in his twenties, Pietro's father had led his less-experienced best friend  Piero on a poorly equipped and poorly planned expedition across melting snow fields.  There was an avalanche, and Piero was killed.  His father never recovered emotionally from the death, especially when everyone -- including his friend's family -- blamed him for his negligence.

While in Nepal, Pietro learns from a local Nepali of a favorite subject of mandala designs -- the secret mountain Sumeru which exists in the center of the earth and is surrounded by the eight mountains and seas which constitute our visible world.  The Nepali continued

We ask who has learned the most, the one who has been to all eight mountains, or the one who has reached the summit of Sumeru?

Pietro, always contemplative, decides that the mountain at Grana was his own Sumeru.  His mountain brings him back repeatedly to Grana and to Bruno.  Bruno and Pietro spend a summer together building a hut high on the slopes above Grana, a place selected by his father before he died.  Bruno has no interest in finding a life in Milan or Turin, a city life away from his mountains.  He considers himself fit only for mountain life, and chooses to live in their hut summer and winter.

Then, the winter Pietro and Bruno were forty, an avalanche hits the house.  Bruno is killed.

From my father I had learnt, long after I had stopped following him along the paths, that in certain lives there are mountains to which we may never return.  That in lives like his and mine you cannot go back to the mountain that is in the center of all the rest, and at the beginning of your own story.  And that wandering around the eight mountains is all that remains for those who, like us, on the first and highest have lost a friend.

Pietro returns to the Himalayas.  A beautiful and beautifully written story.
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*Fred has nothing further to do with this post. He was simply the occasion of my first hearing of the Val d"Aosta.