Giù nella valle

There are animals that are free, gloomy and wild, others that seek a gentle hand and shelter. In between, between the shade and the sun, flows the river. The two brothers are Luigi and Alfredo, a larch and a fir tree: separating them is a house up in the mountains, bringing them together is the bar counter. And then there is Betta, who bathes in the stream and waits for a little girl. In this novel, hard and smooth as a stone, Paolo Cognetti descends from the glaciers of Monte Rosa to listen to the shocks of life in the valley below. His voice sings of fragile existences, lost behind anger, alcohol and a mysterious force that drags them further and further down, overwhelming everything. Along the Sesia, as throughout the world, animals and trees remain silent, suffering the pain of man. A father planted two trees in front of his house, one for each of his children. The first, a larch, is Luigi, tough and fragile, who in thirty-seven years has never left the valley. He and Betta fell in love while bathing in the river pools among the white birches: now it doesn’t happen so often, but they are expecting a baby girl and the scent of a new beginning is in the air. He has just accepted a job as a forester, she comes from the city and reads Karen Blixen. The other tree is a fir: Alfredo is the younger son, shady and resistant to frost, restless and quarrelsome. To avoid causing any more trouble, he chose to run away to Canada, among the sad Indians and oil wells. But now he is back. Alfredo and Luigi have two things in common. The first is in a glass: drinking non-stop for days, collapsing asleep and starting again the next morning, a white wine, a beer, a whisky and then another round, drinking at the bar where they bet on whether the animal killing the dogs along the riverbanks is a wolf, a mad dog or who knows what. In addition to alcohol, however, there is the house in front of those two trees. Now that his father is gone, Alfredo has returned to the valley to free himself from the remaining ties: he doesn’t know it, but that hovel could be worth a fortune from one day to the next. With the rapid pace and clear language of the great authors, Paolo Cognetti has written his Nebraska.