null Skip to main content
Image coming soon

My Stupid Intentions

Bernardo Zannoni

$17.95
SKU:
9781681377285
UPC:
9781681377285
Gift wrapping:
Options available
Published by:
New York Review Books
Translated by:
Alex Andriesse
Pub date:
06/13/2023
Binding type:
Paperback
Pages:
224
ISBN:
9781681377285
Adding to cart… The item has been added
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.