Paolo Cognetti is an Italian writer who spends his time between Milan and his cabin in the Italian alps. The Lovers reads like a reminiscence of the seasons in Fontana Fredda, high above at 1800 meters on Monte Rosa, where cold fountains of water flow right off the glacier and feed into the Rhone, Lake Geneva, and down into France.
Fausto, at forty, was looking for a place to start again after the end of a relationship. In autumn, he walks the trails and gathers wood, watching the larch needles turn yellow, with dinners by the woodstove at Babette's Feast. The female owner had also come from the city and named the only meeting place after Karen Blixen's famous story, about a Parisian chef who worked in a Norwegian village full of simple people uncomprehending of her talents. For three months of the year it attracts families of skiers, and the slope maintenance teams of chairlift operators and snow makers, followed by no clientele except cowherds. Since it opened, everyone calls her Babette, having forgotten her real name.
Winter presents Fausto with a bill for a difficult year, the money he had put aside ran out. Fausto takes a job as cook, with the only waitress Silvia, a young woman who enjoys flirting as he makes set menus of basic food like pasta, sausage, and polenta.
Eventually, they fall into the chilly bed of her unheated room upstairs, trembling in the nude.
Fausto tries his hand at writing, sharing his stories with Silvia, of couples who broke up or stayed together. Silvia gently washing Fausto's hair, they talk about climbing.
Santorso is a snow cat driver who maintains the slopes, a forest ranger of sorts who hunts grouse and tracks the wolf packs, and we find he has a connection to Babette. The four characters work the winter on the mountain until the season ends.
Fausto heads to another world - the valley below - and Babette closes up. Silvia hikes up to a new job at Quintino Sella, a refuge for serious climbers on Glacier Felik, at 3585 meters, where the wind never stops blowing.
As a summer of collecting chicory, and burning juniper comes to an end, will Babette return to reopen? Was the romance of Fausto and Silvia a thing of last winter?
Still: Fontana Fredda prepares for winter, indifferent to the dreams of humans, and continues to exist when they wake up.
This was a simple novel, reading like a personal memoir of his time spent on the mountain. Cognetti has written other stories of the Italian Alps and his love comes through. His first novel, the award-winning The Eight Mountains is about a boy befriending a local of the Alps. With memorable characters and writing that stays with you (not to mention any book which references the classic story/film Babette's Feast earns extra marks) this is recommended. However, I did feel the thrust of the story lose momentum by the end.
It was a season on the mountainside, in a place I did not know existed, and for that journey of the imagination I thank Cognetti.
2023 / Hardcover / 208 pages
Comments