According to Daniel Pennac, the reader's second right is the right not to finish a book. “Does the book drop from your hands? Let it fall.” And he goes on to say that there are thousands of reasons to abandon a book, the principal one being: we never have time, and it is better to spend what little time we have reading what we like. In the past, I used to try to finish a novel or an essay even when I was not enjoying it. What torture! The eldest of my sons persists in this error; for example, he stubbornly insists on finishing All the Pretty Horses, despite finding it ponderous and tedious (see the review of Cormac McCarthy's novel on this site). A few years ago, I decided that I would let a book drop “from my hands” after eighty pages if I found its story uninteresting, its characters poorly drawn, and its prose unappealing, or simply if I preferred to read another book. I applied these superficial rules in this instance. We find ourselves in the midst of the Resistance. Among unidentified hills, but likely along the north-eastern border of Italy, a small contingent of partisans fights against the Nazi-Fascists: they are of various nationalities, united by the shared necessity of survival rather than by hatred toward the Germans and Fascists. There is also a nine-year-old boy: Giorgio, nicknamed the Cabin Boy because the partisans imagine themselves to be the fabled pirates of Tortuga and their band akin to Buccaneers sailing the Caribbean seas. A truly bizarre metaphor, given that they are in the mountains! Why not a group of mountaineers striving to conquer a peak, or the Alpini in the First World War? It is not clear why Giorgio left his home and parents; as we read, we learn that

it had begun, for him, with collaborationist fascists chasing after him. (...) With him running like a hare along the path that, past Capodistrada, climbs for another eight hundred paces—nine hundred if you are tired—before slipping through the brush and into the tangle of brambles, to emerge, already on all fours, at the barn and thus reach that hiding place. Here the boy was adopted by a group of men and women, already accustomed to war and death: loyal, brave, profoundly honest, and protective of Giorgio, as though they were the Tigers of Mompracem. Giorgio learns to live like a partisan, learning step by step to endure cold and hunger, to hide, to remain on alert for a sudden German attack, to forget his family, and finally to fight.

Giorgio, known as the Cabin Boy, narrowed his eyes and, trying to recover that sensation of invisibility, rolled himself up in the rough woolen blanket,

waiting for the dawn when

the contours of things are more under the mind's control and those very things loom less large.

The novel's opening pages promised an interesting story: an adolescent coming of age by confronting a harsh life and fighting for freedom. Unfortunately, the narrative quickly succumbed to the three golden rules. First of all, the storytelling is dull, devoid of plot twists or moments of tension—a predictable and repetitive succession of wartime events and partisan life. Secondly, the characters lack depth, especially Giorgio, whose personality accepts these new, dramatic experiences far too easily. Lastly, the writing is cluttered with pointless, banal dialogue at the expense of setting descriptions and the creation of an atmosphere that aspires to the imaginative, yet remains flatly prosaic. Consequently, I decided to let the book drop; I had another to read, and time is so scarce!

Why not read it? It is boring.

The Pirates of the Mountains