Lottie Lomme
Last year we met Paolo Cognetti (Milan, 1978). He wrote The eight mountains, a beautiful novel about living in nature, which became a bestseller in Italy and far beyond. Now there is a novella with the same themes: nature, the mountains, hiking, solitude and friendships in the mountains: The outside boy.
This book of only 160 pages, however, is not so much a novel as an autobiographical story about the writer's search for himself and rediscovering yourself in nature. He sought solitude in an abandoned house high in the mountains and lived there for a year. For a year, in solitude on his own.
I'd gone up into the mountains with the idea that at some point, if I held on long enough, I'd turn into someone else, and that transformation would be irrevocable, but my old self kept popping up stronger than before. I had learned to split wood, build a fire in a storm, hoe and sow a vegetable garden, cook with mountain herbs, milk a cow and make bales of hay, but I had not learned to be alone, which was the only thing true purpose of the hermit's existence. In that respect I still felt the same as on the first day. The skin of my hands had become firmer, my body stronger and more resilient, but my mind was neither strengthened nor strengthened, was still weak and sickly. My solitude was more like a palace of mirrors than a hut on the heath: everywhere I looked I saw the countless times multiplied reflection of my twisted, grotesque image. I could get rid of everything except that. And so, sprawled on that rock, I came to the conclusion that my venture had failed.
It's a pleasant story. Nice to read how nature is rooted in the mind of the writer. How he writes about the alm, the couloir and the chamois. A vocabulary that was unknown to me, but which I do find sympathy for.
Living in great simplicity
It is amazing how the writer can fall back on nature and a life in great simplicity. He does it, seeing the problems he encounters not as a failing life in the mountains, but as the same problem that vexed him in the city.
He reads a lot of American literature, travelogues, and other writers' stories about the mountains. He befriends a wanderlust dog, who did not want to be enslaved by his previous owner. He has some relationships with other lonely wandering souls who live in the mountains. And meanwhile he tries to find words, to describe what he feels and sees. To redefine its values.
But he didn't say "home." Although he had an obsession with houses, he never referred directly to his own house. Let's go to me, he said. OR: where I live. Never once did I hear him say 'home'. I wondered why that was because I soon started calling every place I lived that. Maybe he didn't feel at home anywhere, or he didn't care which house he lived in because the whole valley was his home. I envied him: being part of a much bigger picture, being part of the forests, the streams, the shape of the mountains, the patch of sky cut out by the bears, the seasons passing by.
the outside boy
by: Paolo Cognetti (translated by Yond Boeke and Patty Krone)
160 pages
€ 18,99
The Busy Bee, June 2018
ISBN 9789403122304
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