The Alps and Dolomites are old, the Himalayas young. Majestic but brutal, resisting man’s efforts to tame them, these mountains embody time and impermanence. An avalanche teaches Pietro the dangers of Alpine winters, but Bruno rejects all his pleas to descend. On the last of several anxious trips from Nepal to Grana, Pietro finds Bruno alone in snow-bound Barma. In part 3, “A Friend in Winter,” Bruno’s refusal to leave the mountain costs him his farm, lover, and child. Pietro shares the house, Barma, with Bruno, as he thinks Giovanni intended. Still close to the elder Guastis, Bruno helps rebuild Pietro’s unexpected legacy, an isolated ruin high on the mountain. In Grana with his mother, Pietro hikes his father’s favorite trails to know him better. Part 2, “The House of Reconciliation,” begins seventeen years later, when Giovanni’s sudden death thwarts Pietro’s plan to reconnect. After Pietro, disturbed by his parents’ growing estrangement, breaks with Giovanni at sixteen, he meets Bruno once more. As they roam the mountains and hike with Giovanni, Bruno draws closer to the family, until his brutish father takes him off to learn building. Part 1, “The Mountain of Childhood,” details the many summers after Pietro meets Bruno, a local lad. Relocated to Milan, they summer in a tiny Alpine village, Grana, where Giovanni transforms from brooding loner to energetic mountaineer and six-year-old Pietro demands to hike with him. When he and Piero’s sister wed, her family ostracizes them. His father, Giovanni, survives an Alpine avalanche that kills his best friend, Piero. Before part 1, an unnamed chapter hints at the Guasti “foundational story,” which haunts Pietro’s family like the mariner’s albatross. The sotto voce of Paolo Cognetti’s first-person narrator, Pietro Guasti, a rootless documentary filmmaker, imbues his tripartite history with nostalgia-the bittersweet pain of homesickness that can bring insight. In its epigraph, Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner exhorts the Wedding Guest to love all creatures, but this novel more closely echoes early Wordsworth. Beyond its mountain setting and understated portraits of a dysfunctional family and a complicated friendship, The Eight Mountains constitutes a moving meditation on man in time and nature. Don’t have kids? Wild Rumpus has a great selection of YA and adult books, and you can still enjoy the animals.With over thirty foreign rights sales, this first novel has won the 2017 Strega, Strega Giovani, and the Prix Médicis étranger. It’s pretty entertaining just watching children and their families interact with everything in the store. I have to admit that since my children are grown, I look for just about any excuse to wander into this store, which is full of fun booksellers, live animals, special events, and cozy reading spots, not to mention books, books, books. You should put Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder on your list.įor a few great book suggestions, I stopped by one of the country’s all-time best children’s bookstores, Wild Rumpus in Minneapolis. What better way to help kids understand the Wild Rumpus Book Store in Minneapolis Exiting Wild Rumpus through the child-size purple door.Ĭoncept of caring for the environment than by reading a super-engaging book on the topic and then venturing out on a lit trip to a local park, garden, or community Earth Day event? Listen up grandparents, aunts and uncles and others who seek interesting ways to interact with the children in your life. Take, for example, the topic of Earth Day. And, it’s a great way to expose children to the pleasures of reading, giving them more ways to relate to books and their subjects. Literary travel allows you to experience both the book and the place in a more intimate way. Literary travel means reading a great book and going where it takes place or to the type of place the book is set, which can be right in your own town. If you’ve spent any time reading this blog, you know my goal is to encourage people to READ and GO. An illustration fron Peter Brown’s beautiful children’s book “The Curious Garden.”
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