After turning 30, Paolo Cognetti (The Eight Mountains) felt restless and unfulfilled in the city of Milan. He missed his childhood summers--the first 20 years of his life--spent in the Italian Alps. Inspired by Thoreau's Walden and the principled quest of Chris McCandless (subject of Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild), he rented a renovated but rustic cabin alone in a village of ruins in a high alpine valley and undertook to learn what the mountains had to teach, to "live deep and suck out all the marrow of life." After years of frustration, he hoped to write again.
The Wild Boy is a memoir of three seasons spent in that cabin, or, more accurately, spent hiking and exploring the mountains he remembered from when he was a boy--that wild boy he hopes to find again. It has a lovely and profound story to tell about connections to land and history and one another. In seeking simplicity and a new start in his life, Cognetti rediscovers timeless truths about the human condition.
This is a stunning book: Cognetti's prose is incandescent when writing about nature, about human history, about friendship and, perhaps most of all, about words. For any reader who has wondered about the next step, loved a mountain or a book, struggled with writer's block or stared in wonder into a forest, this astonishing memoir is necessary. --Julia Kastner, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia