Down in the Valley

Paolo Cognetti’s latest novel is the story of two brothers and two trees. The brothers are Luigi and Alfredo, for whom their father planted a larch and a fir respectively, before taking his life. Luigi is a police forest ranger; he’s an alcoholic and spends his nights sleeping out in the forest. Alfredo is gloomy and violent, leaving the valley in his youth to go and live in Canada, among forests and wolves. Elisabetta is Luigi’s wife, who has chosen a life far from any town. The valley setting for the story is Valsesia, which runs along the river with one side in the sun and one in the shade, like all the elements of this novel, human, environmental and animal. One day, the bodies of dogs with their necks bitten are discovered and an attempt is made to discover whether they were killed by a dog or by a wolf. In keeping with tradition, in Cognetti’s novels the environment is a key character in the book, which opens with love between a dog and a wolf and ends with a chapter that’s an epic poem dedicated to trees and their struggle against the advance of man, their destroyer.

Giù nella valle
Paolo Cognetti
Einaudi, 2023