EIGHT MOUNTAINS (2016)
By Paulo Cognetti
Atria Books,
272 pages
★★★★
When I was in Italy a few years ago I visited the mountain
village where a friend was born many decades earlier. My wife and I drove
higher and higher before reaching our destination. It would be overdramatic to
say the village was a place time forgot, though that would be precisely the
phrase for abandoned hamlets above and below it.
I mention this because one of the themes of Paulo Cognetti's
Eight Mountains is that geologic time
moves slowly and mighty mountains couldn't care less about the rhythms of its
human inhabitants. The village I sought was in the Apennines and Cognetti's in
the Southern Alps, where Italy melds with Switzerland, but it's easy to imagine
a similar vibe. Eight Mountains
follows a decades-long friendship between two individuals from quite different
backgrounds: Milan-raised Pietro Gausti and Bruno Guglielmina, who seldom ventures
far from the confines of greater Grana, a gateway village to the high peaks
near the Matterhorn. Like some of the places I visited, Grana once held
thousands, but now just hundreds.
Pietro and Bruno become soul mates despite their
differences. Pietro comes from an educated bourgeois family who summer in the
Alps; Bruno is a rough-and-tumble peasant lad whose mother is a near mute and
his father a brute. Pietro's parents more politely parallel Bruno's: his mother
is content with rustic pleasures and his father driven to traverse the length
of mountain trails and glaciers, even if it means pushing Pietro like a driven
mule and even though a summit is simply the signal to reverse and go home. For
Pietro, though, the mountains, rivers, scree, and forests are Zen-like—places
to contemplate, not conquer. This is a source of some amusement to Bruno, who
tells him that "nature" is a name those of privilege give to the
mountains, whereas people of his ilk label what is useful: wood, water, stone….
This is certainly the point of view of his people; Bruno's father punches
Pietro's father when the latter offers to take Bruno back to Milan and pay for
his education. Is this an act of tyranny, or a hard kindness?
In practical terms, it means the boys are seasonal friends
who mature along different paths: Pietro becomes the educated professional who
travels the world whilst Bruno lives out the only role he desired: that of a
mountain man. Neither play their roles quite as they would have scripted them,
but who comes closer and why is Pietro lured back to Grana whenever he can get
there? As Bruno casually observes, "You are the one who comes and goes.
I'm the one who stays put." The book's title derives from one of Pietro's visits
to Tibet, where he speaks with a monk who draws an eight-spoked wheel and tells
him that in Buddhist cosmology the great peak Semeru stands at the physical,
spiritual, and metaphysical world, surrounded by eight mountains and eight
seas. The monk asks Pietro, "Who has learned the most, the one who has
been to all eight mountains, or the one who reaches the summit of Semeru?"
Maybe that sounds weird, but think before you judge—it might well be one of
most profound questions ever asked. To put it in more Western terms, is it
better to be a rock or a rolling stone? To know thyself, or to live with the
unknowingness of becoming?
Eight Mountains is
a book about friendship, fate, the things from childhood that can and cannot be
overcome, parental secrets, and both ancient wisdom and nonsense masquerading
as truth. At core it wrestles with the degree to which we change our basic
essence and the limitations of such endeavors. In the end, it's also both an
actual and a philosophical mystery. This is Cognetti's debut novel, and it's
quite an achievement.
Rob Weir
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