This is the buzzing of Grana’s solitary electric street lamp.

This is the bell on the collar of a dog on its nocturnal wanderings.

This, I thought, is the water flowing into the drinking trough. I was used by now to the sounds of the night, and I could recognize them one after another. “Then gradually these thoughts also dispersed, and I lay awake listening. His son observes at one point that some other climbers seem to resent the way in which he needs to conquer the mountains and while he does find a kind of reverie there, there’s also a competitive need to be the best, to almost own them, a product perhaps of a childhood spent in state care where a sense of belonging was often tenuous at best. It is inevitable, of course, that Pietro is drawn into this almost obsessive love of the mountains which manifests in his father’s need to hike up every mountain along various paths, sometimes onto glaciers, always at speed and with a need to prove his is the most unique connection to these soaringly massive cathedrals of nature, the one that matters most. His mother and father met in the mountains and it comes to define their life together over and over again, with the Monte Rosa, a massif which runs between ranges in Italy and Switzerland, a refuge and a source of familial tension, particularly for Pietro’s dad who works in the city of Milan but for whom the mountains are a place of relief and almost salvation from the many demons nipping at his heels. Pietro is the son of two people who have always loved the mountains of northern Italy. People often define themselves in terms of context and relationships, and both these important markers of human expression are on poignant display in The Eight Mountains (Le otto montagne) by Paolo Cognetti, a novel which explores how both impact the life of one young Italian man who is surrounded by so much possibility, much of which he struggles to translate into something lasting and meaningful.

Le otto montagne by Paolo Cognetti