My Stupid Intentions
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- 10,99 €
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- 10,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
A stunning, ambitious novel that follows an unusual protagonist—a beech marten, a kind of weasel, who learns to read and write, discovers God and time, and develops a keen sense of self that makes him seem almost human.
My Stupid Intentions is the autobiography of a beech marten named Archy. Born into poverty, maimed by an accident, he is sold into servitude by his mother and taught to read and write by Solomon—a pawnbroking fox whose knowledge derives from a Bible that fell on his head while he was busy feeding on a hanged man.
Even as Archy’s life is transformed by his discovery of the written word and his grappling with the entity called God, he longs for an existence guided by instinct. He longs to be “a real animal.” But there is no way of unlearning what he has learned. Caught between his natural urges and his acquired knowledge, he seeks the meaning of his story by writing it.
This debut novel by the young Italian author Bernardo Zannoni is set in a primordial landscape where animals talk and tend their hearths but are never free from the struggle for survival. A picaresque fable, it has drawn comparisons to Pinocchio and Watership Down, The Wind in the Willows and The Stranger.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The intelligent animals of Zannoni's zany debut couldn't be further from the gentle beasts of Disney. The guide to this savage natural world is Archy, a beech marten whose first harsh lesson comes when he is crippled by a fall from a tree while stealing robin's eggs. His second comes when his family sells him to a cantankerous and shrewd old fox named Solomon. Solomon teaches Archy to read, write, and fear God; in time, Archy becomes the equal of the forest's wild boars, dogs, and rabbits despite his injury, yet he still worries God has interfered, making him "the only anomaly in a design that was already staring me in the face." After his search for his family ends in disappointment, Archy—recognizing that even Solomon will one day pass from the earth—seeks his own destiny. He comes to know love only to leave it behind, and a battle with a vengeful lynx takes him far from the only hill he has ever known. Taking refuge in the burrow of a particularly obsequious porcupine, he begins to compose his memoirs. In this exciting modern twist on The Wind in the Willows, Zannoni knows when to leave his existential Eden behind and go for the jugular.
