The Wild Boy

Many novels -- certainly many first novels -- are in a sense autobiographical.  They are based on the author's own life.  And when I read Paolo Cognetti's first novel, The Eight Mountains, a story of a young city boy who grew up spending his summers in the Italian Alps, the story was so vivid, the observations so detailed, the grasp of a climber's mind and temperament so true, that I was convinced that Cognetti was a climber turned writer.

As it turns out, The Eight Mountains, published in Italian in 2016, was even more autobiographical than I expected.  Cognetti had written in 2013 a memoir of a half year spent in the same region, near the Val d'Aosta, as his novel's protagonist.  The memoir, The Wild Boy, reveals that Cognetti had grown up in Milan, but, like Pietro in his novel had been taken by his parents to the Alps each year, staying each year in the same cabin.  Like Pietro, he had drifted away from the Alps when he reached his twenties.

At some point, urban life began to seem like prison, and he recalled the mountains as the place where freedom began.  He reads with longing Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild, the non-fictional reconstruction of the life of Chris McCandless, the young man who fled to the wilds of Alaska and died ultimately of starvation.  But he didn't feel the need to flee all the way to Alaska.  He was happy to return to the Alps of his childhood, while admitting that there is no true wilderness in the Alps.  More apt, considering his own plans, was Thoreau's Walden -- the nineteenth century author's account of living alone on a site outside Concord, Massachusetts, where he hoped

to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.,

And so Cognetti rents a cabin far up in the hills, taking his books and notebooks, and settles in with the hope of, by living alone, becoming more observant, more reflective, closer to nature.

Cognetti's childhood love of the mountains hadn't been instantaneous, but earned.  He recalls that alpinism  "had been for me as a child a way of confronting fear, exhaustion, and cold."  It was about being far from home.  And because he, like his creature Pietro, was prone to altitude sickness, it was also about physical pain.  Under the guidance of a skilled and compassionate mountaineering instructor, he gradually overcame these childhood complaints, and had become a strong climber and a youth skilled in mountaineering techniques.

Now, returning to the mountains after many years, he quickly learns that he "wasn't cut out to be a hermit."  He found himself constantly seeking someone to talk to.  When a neighboring cattle herder shows a slight sign of friendliness, Cognetti feels his heart beating, he is so excited.

At one point he feels his experiment has been a failure.

I had learned how to chop wood, to light a fire in a rainstorm, to hoe and plant a vegetable garden, to milk a cow, and to stack bales of hay; but I had not learned how to be alone -- the only true aim ultimately, of any hermit-like retreat.  ...  More than a hut in the woods, solitude resembled a house of mirrors; everywhere I looked I found myself reflected: distorted, grotesque, multiplied an infinite number of times.  I could free myself of everything except him.

Although he concluded that his inability to be alone made his return to the mountains a failure, this period of depression was experienced at a low point mid-way through his half year. 

But his stay in the mountains lives up to many of his hopes.  He becomes a close observer of nature -- the plants, animals, snow, clouds, and weather patterns that he encounters.  He has a sincere and touching tendency to worry about the animals around him -- not only the victims of hunters, but those who suffer and die as part of nature's normal cruelty -- the mouse emerging from snow under which it has hibernated, the small bird alive but dying from unknown causes.  Moreover, he feels the same empathy for non-animate (so far as we know) objects -- the tree downed by lightning, the abandoned hut that is falling into decay.

At times, we feel we can understand Cognetti's desire to withdraw from the world, while still desiring companionship with those he feels are like-minded.  He is too sensitive to tolerate bruisings that most of us take for granted, bruisings not merely of himself but of other people.  Of wildlife.  Of nature.  Of the Earth itself.

At last, even his cabin seems too confining, too civilized.  Too full of books and labor saving devices.  He straps on his pack and goes out into nature -- but soon ends up living at an eight thousand foot altitude with two other men his age who are managing a refuge for hikers and climbers -- visitors who, to their relief, rarely show up.   "The Ephemerals," they call these visitors.

By October, the weather is turning, and his hut is not capable of sheltering him through the winter.  And, like Thoreau a couple of centuries before him, he seems psychologically ready to return to the city and give it another try  He has learned as much about himself, at least for one year, as he could expect.

But we must go, I said to Lucky [his adopted dog].  It was time to go back down.  I already knew all the dreams that I would have that winter.

Did he ever go back?  I don't know.  But in the next three years, he found the time to write and publish The Eight Mountains, a prize-winning book translated into 39 languages, which was largely inspired by the events chronicled in his memoir, The Wild Boy.