The Mountain

Set in Yugoslavia during the Croatian War of Independence, The Mountain opens when American journalist John Anderson discovers a few days before Serbian troops are due to take over their village that his musician wife Anna was involved in yearlong affair that she had just ended. He forgives her at first as they are in the midst of desperately planning their escape through a war zone to the border to Hungary. But only a few days into their journey they meet a soldier and his distrust of Anna re-emerges when she and the soldier seem to have mysteriously disappeared together. In a fit of jealousy he abandons her altogether on suspicion of further cheating and ventures forth across a mountain on an odyssey of self-discovery. When he encounters a massacre in a small village he starts to wonder if he has made a mistake and unwittingly endangered her life. He then tries desperately to find her and save her from the tragic fate he believes he helped create. Like Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls in its portrayal of war and its effect on human relationships, but with a deeper sense of psychological introspection, The Mountain is Antonelli's poetic novel to date. The Mountain is the second part of the Andrássy ut trilogy, which begins with The Forest and is a series of three thematically related novellas with American protagonists based in Eastern Europe exploring love and deception against the background of modern life.