Le otto montagne- Paolo Cognetti  (2016)
“Comiciai a capire un fatto, e cioè che tutte le cose, per un pesce di fiume, vengono da monte: insetti, rami, foglie, qualsiasi cosa. Per questo guarda verso l’alta, in attesa di ciò che deve arrivare. Se il punto in cui ti immergi in un fiume è il presente, pensai, allora il passato è l’acqua che ti ha superato, quella che va verso il basso e dove non c’è più niente per te, mentre il futuro è l’acqua che scende dall’alto, portando pericoli e sorprese. Il passato è il valle, il futuro a monte. Ecco come avrei dovuto rispondere a mio padre. Qualunque cosa sia il destino, abita nelle montagne che abbiamo sopra la testa.”

“I began to understand something, and that’s that everything, for the fish in the river, comes from the mountain: insects, branches, leaves, whatever. Because of this, one looks upward in expectation of that which should arrive. If the point in which you get in the river is the present, I thought, then the past is the water that has passed you and continues downward where it’s no longer anything to you, while the future is the water that descends from above, carrying dangers and surprise. The past is the valley, the future is the mountain. That’s how I should have answered my dad. Whatever destiny is, it lives in the mountains over our heads.” 

This explanation was from a dialog between the boy Pietro and his father. His father had asked him if the water we see is like the present in time, which is the past and which is the future? Pietro initially says the water downstream is the future. But later he thinks about it and changes his mind. 

Pietro is a boy who lives in Torino, whose parents are both from a mountain region. They go every summer to the mountains where his dad teaches him to hike and enjoy the outdoors. In the mountains, he meets another young boy, Bruno, who he becomes life-long friends with.  

The first part of the book narrates the story of Pietro and Bruno as kids. The second part shows them as young adults. Pietro’s father, who was sullen and difficult in the city, but more alive in the mountains, has died. At one point as a young man, Pietro decides he is no longer interested in following his father up the mountains. After his father dies, Pietro discovers that his father had maintained a relationship with Bruno, and they had often hiked together. His father had bought and left him a ruined mountain cabin that Bruno would remake. So the two friends set about rebuilding the place. Pietro is in between two worlds- the city and the mountains. But as he goes through the years, he realizes he is more drawn to the mountains. He takes a trip to Nepal to see the Himalayas.  

There, he meets an old Nepalese man, who tells him of the eight mountains. The old man asked him why he was there, and Pietro explained he had grown up in the mountains and fell in love with them, wanting to see the most beautiful mountains in the world. The old man says he is taking a tour of the eight mountains. The Nepalese man explains that at the center of the world is the highest mountain- Sumeru, and around it are 8 mountains and 8 seas. This is the world. Then the old man says that people ask: who has learned more? The one who has traveled to the eight mountains or the one who has reached the top of Sumeru? 

This question will arise again as the two men go through life. Bruno ends up living with a woman and having a child with her up in the mountains. He is convinced that he has no place off the mountains. But his enterprise and farm fail financially. His ‘wife’ is frustrated that he sees the failure coming, but refuses to change. When it all fails, she takes the daughter and goes back to the city to restore what she can of her life.  
Pietro comes home and tries to help Bruno, but he refuses to move. At some point, Bruno disappears into the mountains and is never heard from again. 

The Pursuit of Italy- David Gilmour  (2011)
This is an overview history of Italy, from as far back as we can go within history up to 2011.  

There is an interesting quote I found: “Patriotic intellectuals fulminated against Austria not because it was a bad ruler, but because it was an occupier, though for propaganda purposes they had to claim it was both. They needed to label Austria as the oppressor to justify their title to be considered liberators.”  

A Literary Tour of Italy- Tim Parks  (2015) 
This was a really interesting review of some representatives of Italian literature. Many of these I had read already, but maybe 40% I had not. So I added another 12 or so books to my list of Italian books I want to read. There were also some really interesting bits about what exactly the literature tells us about Italians, and life in Italy.  

The Three Musketeers- Alexandre Dumas  (1844) 
This story is so well-known I don’t need to say anything about the plot. This is not deep, philosophical literature, it was just fun storytelling. I’d previously read his works The Count of Monte Cristo and The Man in the Iron Mask, two of the longest books on my shelf, but hadn’t bothered with the Three Musketeers since the story was so well-known. But I’ve now added it to the collection. 

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea- Jules Verne  (1870) 
Jules Verne was an immensely popular writer of a then popular genre of science-fiction fantasy. Given the scientific progress of the mid 19th century, many of his novels seemed entirely plausible to his readers, and Verne himself did his best to read up on the latest science in order to sound plausible in his stories. Much of the story is littered with detailed descriptions of the exact places they’ve visited: latitudes and longitudes, place names, extensive biological categories and other scientific details that would give the story an air of veracity. This is the story of Captain Nemo and the Nautilus, and the round the world journey the nautilus makes with three passengers. 

Journey to the Center of the Earth- Jules Verne  (1864) 
Another of Jules Verne’s novels combining science (as it was in the 1860’s…) with fantastic adventures.   

A Confederacy of Dunces- John Kennedy Toole  (1969) 
This novel was written in 1969, but not published until 1980. The author had committed suicide shortly after the manuscript was written, and it was the efforts of his mother pushing to get the manuscript read and noticed that finally led to the book being published 11 years after the author’s death. 

The story has it’s funny moments… but the lead character, Ignatius Reilly, is such an overbearing idiot (yes, I know that’s the point) that I really struggled at times to like the novel. Towards the end, as his idiocy catches up to and starts to haunt him, the novel gets funnier to me. But the first few hundred pages I didn’t find myself laughing much at the nonsense.