5 stars to the enchanting and quietly-written, The Eight Mountains! ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

Pietro and his parents are from the metropolitan city of Milan and vacation in the Dolomites of Italy in a remote village. Pietro’s father is consumed with climbing the tallest peaks, which is difficult for Pietro to understand. While in the shadow of his father, he forms a friendship with Bruno, a child from the village.

Over time, the mountains and his friendship with the steadfast Bruno help to keep Pietro grounded. His life experiences many changes, but the mountains and Bruno are always there for him, unwavering.

Cognetti’s prose, even through translation, is most alluring. The mountains themselves become a character in the novel with much symbolism to be deciphered.

A story of friendship and family relationships in a glorious alpine setting, The Eight Mountains is a quiet book worthy of a re-read and more reflection.

This book came highly recommended by my friends, Cheri and Angela M. Thank you both for an unforgettable read!

For this and other Traveling Sister Reviews, please visit Brenda and Norma’s fabulous blog: https://twosisterslostinacoulee.com

Thank you to Paolo Cognetti, Atria, and Netgalley for the ARC. The Eight Mountains is now available!

Eight Mountains will break your heart if you are one who dwells lower than snow line, but loves someone who dwells higher. I am, and I do, and this book, while illuminating, is also very close to the bone.

With beautiful, descriptive language, Cognetti takes us deep into the heart of the Dolomiti and the Himalaya, and helps us understand the lure of the mountains.

The writing about the mountains was exquisite. This is a story about two boys who grow up together and form a lasting friendship with each other and both love the mountains. This is a wonderful coming of age story.

I would like to thank Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with a review copy in exchange for my honest and unbiased opinion of it.

This was a wonderfully written story about friendship, that between two young boys Bruno and Pietro, who meet and develop their relationship over many years. They both share the love of the mountains, the Dolomites in Italy in this case. They bring their thrill and love for this area together as they explore the lush beautiful and often dangerous environs of this area. Their parents although not in what seems to be loving relationships do love the mountains as well.

As the boys reach maturity they each go their separate ways, one to stay upon his beloved mountains and the other to travel the world. Even though they are separated by many miles, they come together often to reestablish both their friendship nurtured by age, and their enduring love of the mountains.

This was a lovely coming of age story told with a background of beauty and compassion. The boys' camaraderie, their friendship grows into something special something hard to find in the days where so many things tend to separate us from each other.

Thank you to Paolo Cognetti, the publisher, and NetGalley for making an advanced copy of this quiet yet moving novel available to this reader.

Thank you Net Galley for the free ARC. Excellent book! The main theme is the lifelong friendship between two boys. One who is an adventurer and one who stays behind, that they share is the love for the mountains. Loved the writing.

This is for fans of coming of age and personal discovery stories of young men, this time set in Europe. It didn't especially resonate with me but this is well written and it's a popular genre. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC.

http://www.themodernnovel.org/europe/w-europe/italy/paolo-cognetti/the-eight-mountains/

Excellent narrative of a young boy in Italy, who inherits his parents love of the mountains. It is also a story of friendships that endure into adulthood.

The Eight Mountains by Paola Cognetti is a story of friendship and family. Pietro and Bruno meet in Italy as young boys, and share their summers together. While Pietro goes back to Milan in winter, Bruno stays near the mountains tending to his family's livestock. Eventually, Pietro goes to college and their summers together come to an end.


A lifelong friendship despite large spans of being apart, they are reunited later in life. The story is mainly focused on character development and less on plot.


While enjoyable to read, I did not feel a strong connection to any of the characters. Pietro as the narrator often seemed to lack an understanding of his friend (and others), and this may have been the primary contributing factor.


I wanted more from this book, and in the end it did not deliver.

A very good novel of a father, his son and their mountain climbing history. It also tells the story of a neighboring young boy and his relationship to both the father and son. Many good intentions gone wrong among the relationships.

Quiet, introspective, first person narrative, things that I am always drawn to in a book, combined with beautiful writing that had me highlighting passages right from the start. This along with characters I cared about made for a five star book for me . The mountains, the Dolomites in northern Italy and later the Himalayas, the landscape that affects the landscape of the lives of the characters both individually and in their relationships with each other . Husband and wife, father and son , two young boys forging a friendship and a bond that remains unbreakable in spite of years of separation. Pietro, raised in Milan, doesn’t always understand the pull of the mountains on his father, or the hold that they have on his friend Bruno. It is years later after his father’s death that Pietro connects with his father, with Bruno’s help . It is when he experiences the pull of the mountains and learns his father’s story that father and son become bound in a way that is poignant and heartbreaking. A beautifully written story. A short book and a short review, but a book full of depth of loss, friendship and love.


I received an advanced copy of this book from Atria through NetGalley.

EIGHT MOUNTAINS (2016)
By Paulo Cognetti
Vintage Publishing, 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

This is an adventure story between two Italian boys from different backgrounds as they go mountain climbing. It is a lyrical poetic book, and a long slow read. I am not sure who the market for the book is as I don't think most boys would want to read a book written in this style.

This book definitely reminds Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend series. Whilst the Ferrante was focusing of a friendship between two women, this book is focused on men. Ferrante's books was packed with lots of events, this one is much more slow paced. The writing is good quality however I couldn't help to think if some of the effect was lost during translation. The writing is dreamy, and although the plot is not the most interesting, the quality of writing keeps you going. I wish I could read this in Italian.

“ Sometimes I forget what living's for
And I hear my life through my front door
And I'll breathe it in
Oh I'm home again

"All the empty disappears
I remember why I'm here
Just surrender and believe
I fall down on my knees
Oh hello world
Hello world
Hello world”
-- “Hello World” – Lyrics by Tom Douglas, Tony Lane, David Lee

Pietro’s father, an orphan of the war, would seem to never take in the world around him when he climbed the mountains, he was more concerned with achieving some unspoken, unknown goal. When he was old enough to climb the mountains with his father, he was rarely alongside him. A mountain was a goal to be achieved, a notch on his belt. No whining, no complaining. If he saw someone up ahead, his pace quickened with the goal of overtaking them.

His mother liked to say that it was only her strong legs that had brought them together, had seduced him. She liked to soak it all in, the vistas that went beyond a single point of focus ahead.

A priest had once taken them up into the mountains when they were still young, and that same priest would, in turn, marry them many years later on a lovely morning in October of 1972. An autumnal wedding, in front of a chapel at the foot of the Tre Cime di Lavaredo. In a sense, he was there, a silent, unseeing witness to the beatings of her heart.

The next day, they headed for a new life in Milan, the two of them, soon to be three.

It is in the mountains of Pietro’s childhood, that he befriends Bruno, a boy who lives nearby. A boy his mother had wanted to take under her, their, wing. She wished for him to have a childhood that included attending school rather than herding cows. And so Bruno becomes a fixture in their lives. A friendship that will see years pass with little contact, yet a lifelong friendship takes root.

This tale of lives intertwined, each one with unique, perhaps with even somewhat stubbornly held, views but nevertheless there is that bond that keeps it from unraveling completely. Beautiful in its simplicity, the writing reflects this ease in this ode to a friendship, an ode to the beauty of the mountains, to this life, and even to the gifts received through the love our parents instilled in us of a simpler way of life.

An ode to life.


Pub Date: 20 Mar 2018

Many thanks for the ARC provided by Atria Books

Reminiscent of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Quartet and Robert Seethaler's "A Whole Life". Cognetti's "The Eight Mountains" is a beautiful tale of rural life in the Italian mountains and the lifelong friendship between two boys, Pietro and Bruno.
Pietro is a solitary city boy, brought up as an only child by his parents in Milan, who travels with his family to the Dolomites for a summer holiday. During his stay he forges a friendship with Bruno, a local boy from the village where their holiday let is situated. While the two boys couldn't come from more diverse backgrounds, they find common ground in their love of the great outdoors and the mountain playground at their disposal.
Pietro's father, Giovanni, is something of a pushy parent. An avid mountain climber, he's driven by his desire to conquer the hills around them and to be the best - the fastest, the toughest, the most peaks scaled. Challenged by altitude sickness, Pietro literally struggles to follow in his father's footsteps, leaving room for Bruno to fulfill some of the father/son bonding that Giovanni desires.
However, he takes things a step too far, when he offers to take Bruno to Milan and give him a more formal education, as Bruno has a father of his own who wants his son to follow in his footsteps, tending their smallholding in the hills producing cheese.
As time passes the two boys drift apart and then are brought back together again by life, death, love and loss, all set against the stunning backdrop of the Italian mountains. This is a beautifully written family saga that will have you engrossed from the start. Cognetti creates vivid, rich, flawed characters to inhabit the harsh but beautiful landscapes to great effect. I couldn't put this book down!

While the scenery and imagery were beautiful, I just couldn't get into this. I felt no connection to the characters and the plots was just to slow and dry for me.

3.5 stars

Mountains exert a powerful fascination on the modern mind. They offer freedom, escape, wilderness, the shrugging-off of civilisation. They promise an elemental battle between humanity and nature. And they hold out the prospect of possession: peaks to be claimed and conquered. In this restrained and elegant novel, Paolo Cognetti tells the story of Pietro, a young boy from Milan whose life will be shaped by a childhood friendship formed in the high valleys of the Italian Alps. A tale of obsession, of fathers and sons, of friendship and of belonging, this is a poignant glimpse of a fading world.

Pietro’s parents met through a shared love of climbing and he grows up surrounded by the folklore of the mountains. It’s only during their alpine holidays that his difficult, short-tempered father seems to relax, as if returning to his natural habitat, and when Pietro is twelve, the family rents a little cabin in the hill-village of Grana. Here, Pietro’s father goes off on epic solo marches up into the mountains, savouring the clarity of the air and the challenges of the nearby glacier; Pietro’s mother turns with contentment to a simple rustic life; and Pietro himself goes out to explore and have fantasy adventures. Here, one day, he encounters Bruno Guglielmina, a local boy who herds his family’s cows and is similarly starved of friendship. From self-conscious beginnings, a close friendship develops: an almost fraternal bond that ties the two boys together.

The years pass, and each summer Pietro’s family returns to Grana. As he grows older, he begins to go walking with his father – and Bruno joins them as often as he can. Cognetti traces the impact of these simple, happy days throughout the boys’ lives, using them as a way to illuminate Pietro’s uneasy relationship with his father and his growing sense of his own place in the world. The book isn’t a narrative so much as a series of vignettes, showing us not only the boys growing into men, and their changing friendship, but also the changes in Grana itself. In emphasising the vast eternity of the mountains, the book illuminates the way that an ancient lifestyle can begin slowly to shift – and then, with the force and suddenness of an avalanche, crumble away.

I’ve seen the book compared to Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, but I’m not sure how far I would agree with this – beyond the fact, of course, that it focuses on a long-term Italian friendship. Cognetti’s book is more detached, more dreamlike, a tale of the mountains as much as of the boys themselves. There are times when it seems to drift rather than having the dynamism of Ferrante’s story. Yet it does share that elegiac sense of nostalgia: a picture of an Italy which is all the more moving because we know that it has been lost forever.

For the review, please see my blog:
https://theidlewoman.net/2017/12/22/the-eight-mountains-paolo-cognetti/

A gently told story of friendship among two Italian boys from different backgrounds, growing up and evolving in the Alps. With their strong attachments to the mountain life and solitude, The Eight Mountains by Paolo Cognetti, took me through a beautiful experience in the Italian alps. Vividly described landscapes with the lessons of friendships, attachments to the land, as well as priorities for life styles, taking their toll and shaping their lives. Mixed with sorrow and exhilarating experiences, this novel was a wonderful, reflective read. Thank you NetGalley, Atria Books, and Paolo Cognetti for this early edition copy to review.

As a young boy, Pietro vacations with his parents at a remote area that can barely be called a village in the Dolomites. With his father becoming more and more determined to scale the 4,000's (as the more challenging peaks are called), Pietro develops a friendship with Bruno, a local boy, largely through the encouragement of his mother. As the years progress and Pietro finds his way throughout the world, his connections to that village and Bruno remain a constant in his life. Cognetti's writing is glorious, and the symbolism of the eponymous mountains as challenges to be met and appreciated, rings true. Wonderful that this fine translation is finally available to English readers.