Additional Book Information
Series: New York Review Books
ISBN: 9781681377285
Pages: 224
Publication Date: June 13, 2023
My Stupid Intentions
by Bernardo Zannoni, translated from the Italian by Alex Andriesse
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.
Praise
My Stupid Intentions is a beautiful beech marten of a novel: cunning, sleek, warm-blooded, and feral. Bernardo Zannoni executes a daring premise with heart and humor. A thrilling debut.
—Nathaniel Rich
A small saga by an offensively gifted young writer, My Stupid Intentions looks at our deepest hopes and fears through the lives of feral creatures. This deeply fascinating parable is by turns sweet and ruthless, joyful and cruel. Zannoni has created a world where bliss and tragedy live divided by a hairsbreadth, one following the other as surely as summer chases fall.
—Laura Graveline, Brazos Bookstore
I resisted reading this novel. Talking animals? And what is a marten, anyway? But to my surprise I was quickly drawn in by the swift flow of events and the acute sensibility of its narrator, Archy. The tale of his life is rich with difficulty, change, adventure, and tragic turns of fate, like human lives. But he remains an animal, and the tension between his all too human narrative and his animal nature drives the story with an uncanny and irresistible force.
—Lynne Sharon Schwartz
A novel of extraordinary caliber, driven along by an extraordinary youthful aplomb mellowed and transfigured by the wise and symbolic world of the fairy tale.
—L’Indice dei libri del mese
Zannoni has written an anthropomorphic picaresque novel, but this description doesn’t do it justice. It is sweet and cruel, a tale about difference, weakness, and change. . . . Every time we forget that Archy is a beech marten, we are reminded of it by Zannoni’s depictions of ruthless and devastating nature, whose inexorable seasons must be respected and feared.
—Avvenire
The life of a beech marten, told by himself, [it] is a novel that fascinates from its first pages and, in the end, delivers on all of its promises.
—Il Quotidiano del Sud
A limpid and ambitious novel, written by a twenty-five-year-old. A surprising debut.
—Alto Adige