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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.
"This darkly beguiling novel casts its enchantments with an eye trained on the human heart, with its false chambers and rough, bestial inclinations. A remarkable education in the grief of staying alive." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"The intelligent animals of Zannoni's zany debut couldn't be further from the gentle beasts of Disney... 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." —Publishers Weekly
"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
"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
This information about My Stupid Intentions was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Bernardo Zannoni is an Italian author from Sarzana. Zannoni began working on his debut novel, My Stupid Intentions, at age 21.
Alex Andriesse was born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in 1985. His stories, essays, and poems have appeared in Granta, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Prodigal, and Literary Imagination. He has translated several works from Italian and French and is an associate editor at New York Review Books.
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