Jean Giono (1895–1970)

A marvelous work; the writing is some of Giono’s best. This is not the gentle pre-war Giono of Second Harvest (Regain) or Joy of Man’s Desiring but the embittered postwar man, a man with good reason to have changed his view of the world. Unique image follows unique image, indelible lines in a paragraph. Giono’s delineation of his characters seems to me exceptional, in part for how he strikingly does it through conversation and in particular the words not said. As is often the case, show more Giono pays great attention to the natural world, partly for its own sake and partly for the way in which doing so illuminates the characters and the story. But Giono is also a master at drawing characters through their interactions with others.
The story takes place in the high plains of Provence, deep in the mountains. Villages are small and insular, personalities large and quirky and distinct, and the environment is inseparable from the daily life of its inhabitants. Strangers are viewed with distrust or suspicion. Appetites and behaviors of all kinds are outsized. Marceau Jason and his much-younger brother Ange are inseparable and Giono goes out of his way in the beginning to emphasize just how much Marceau worships his younger brother. A long early chapter defines the women around them—their mother, their wives, and an old widow in their village. The women are drawn almost exclusively through their interminable conversation, one that captures the nuances and idiosyncrasies of each woman. There is little overarching plot; the novel is mostly vignettes of the brothers’ lives. Ange has grown up watching Marceau perform feats of superhuman strength and he finally demands of him “recognition with honor.” Although Ange is a large and powerful man, Marceau is an enormous, almost unreal, giant of a man. Ange is still young and places too little value on the unmistakable love that Marceau has for him. His gauge of recognition—a wrestling match, a test of strength—is not a fight at all. It is, instead, the tale of an impatient young man and younger brother eager to test himself, to prove himself against his much older, stronger, brother…his idol. Tragically, neither Ange nor Marceau knows how to do anything except completely, with all their heart, and without any constraint. And so the wrestling match that Ange has demanded as his measure of his recognition becomes not a friendly contest but a life-and-death struggle of sickening violence. The match ends predictably but novel continue, with an ending which I leave to those who will read this remarkable book. The end is not quite predictable, not quite understandable, an ending not of jealousy or even of hatred but of a deep and abiding love. show less

This book literally fell off of the bookshelf and landed at my feet, cover up, beckoning me to read it. The cover art, featuring a beautifully detailed hand planting an acorn into the soil, further locked my attention.

When our narrator first encounters him, while wandering in a barren, rural landscape, Elézard Bouffier is a shepherd who had given himself the duty of planting oak trees, a bucket of acorns at a time, every day. No motive is given except one of pure care for the world and show more perhaps an implied sense of humble duty.

Over the years and across two world wars that hardly occupy more than a few sentences, Bouffier's efforts continue and expand to birch and other trees. The effects are transformative. The land springs back to life. Streams are restored, the air is purified, other flora and fauna return. There are lessons in these efforts about ecology and naturalism but also about simple care and duty and their restorative effects on not just some of nature but all of it.

I might fancifully liken the book, in falling from the top of my bookshelf, to be an acorn planted into my awareness. In giving the book some quiet attention it returned to me a feeling of peaceful contemplation and a respect for the humble duty of caring. This is not a gripping story, necessarily, but it is arresting in the enticing worldview it offers. show less

So far the most attractive book of Giono's I've read, with the charm typical for childhood memoirs. The period spanned is from the turn of the century up to 1914, the year young Jean was conscripted to wage war, the place the hinterland of Provence. His father (of Italian, Piemontese extraction) was a shoemaker in a small town with many aspects of a village and at a certain age Jean was also sent to live an even more rural life with a shepherding family, to "man up". The book's chapters are show more composed of many vignettes describing the region and the characters, embedded or drifting through, especially men looking for work. It was a difficult time and poverty was omnipresent. One harsh winter decimates the population of the town through starvation and disease.

Giono, like his father, was very sympathetic to anarchism and this is still very much in evidence at the time the book was published, in particular in this segment, addressed to one of his friends killed in the war:

What would you have me do with this France which, it seems, you like me helped preserve? What would you have us do with it, we who have lost all our friends? Ah! If it were necessary to defend rivers, hills, mountains, skies, winds, rains, I'd say: "All right, that's our job. Let's fight, all our life's joy is here." No, we defended the false name of all that. Me, when I see a river I say "river", when I see a tree, I say "tree"; I never say "France". That doesn't exist.

Ah! How I'd give away all of that false name just so that one of those who died could live, the most simple, the most humble. Nothing can counterbalance the heart of a man. They are always there talking about God! It's God who flicked his finger against the scales of blood at the moment the child fell from his mother's opening. They are always there talking about God, and yet the only good thing God worked, the only thing God made, the life he himself, despite your imbecile sciences with spectacles, alone made, that life you crush at will in abominable mortars of mud and snot, with the blessings of all your churches. Lovely logic!

There is no glory in being French. There is only one glory: being alive. show less

In telling this story involving a serial killer, a hunt for a marauding wolf, and at least two deaths, perhaps accidental, Jean Giono creates an unsettling air early. “The light turns the color of hare innards, then an extraordinary black that, black as it is, has shadows of deep purple.”

And: “All the farm can do is hide in the ground and it’s plain to see that it’s doing just that with all it’s might.” That’s before we know what the story even is.

In 1843 Langlois, who is show more said to possess “a deep knowledge of human things,” arrives at a remote French alpine village. He tracks and shoots, possibly by accident, a serial killer. Some years later he returns for good as the resident wolf hunter. He befriends a former prostitute and a Captain’s wife, “beautiful and languid like a lake afternoon in June,” but remains removed from, but respected by, most other residents. Things turn when he takes a younger wife from Grenoble and the end of the story is sharp and brutal. show less