The Peasants

I think your reaction to Reymont will depend largely on your willingness to be pleased with storytelling. Or, more precisely, storytelling alone. That he received the Nobel Prize (in 1924) for this work over Thomas Mann and Thomas Hardy strikes me as peculiar (to put it mildly). My problem with Reymont is precisely that: he is content to describe and, as good as he is at description, as good as he is at evoking a time and place, 900 pages later, there is not much more than that. Indeed, even his most fully realized characters lack much psychological depth; Reymont describes their behavior exhaustively but probes their motivations only marginally. There is very little in this work of four novels that provokes much thought notwithstanding show more his quite evident political sympathies. This may, however, be a matter of taste. I much prefer Marcel Pagnol’s masterwork, L’eau des collines (The Water of the Hills, comprising Jean de Florette and Manon des sources). Pagnol is likewise strong on the natural world…the color and texture of village life and landscape. Both writers each create worlds rich in the traditions and rhythms of life that is inextricably bound to the seasons. These works are as much about the land and everything in it they are about the lives of people. But where Pagnol uses this to fashion a masterful Greek tragedy, Reymont is content to tell a story. And although he is an excellent storyteller, I came away disappointed because I had hoped for more. I expected to come away with more to think about than I did. It may be unfair to blame Reymont for not writing the book I expected to read, but I will do so nonetheless. I enjoyed the world he created and I thought his characters, major and minor alike, were well-drawn. But I also thought that Reymont too often indulged himself; too often, for example, he gets caught up in his own lyricism and spends far too many pages on a scene, becoming repetitive and wearying. In addition, Reymont is overly fond of contrast. There are often lengthy romanticized paeans to nature and peasant life inevitably followed by long sections devoted to the destructive power of nature and the crushing weight of poverty. The first five times, the juxtapositions are impressive and convincing. By the tenth or fifteenth time, the effect is simply tiresome. Peasant life is idyllic but the poverty is cruel; rural nature is transcendent but the weather is atrocious. Over and over and over. Things are either black or white in Reymont’s world and too frequently both. Nine hundred pages of this constant back-and-forth plus scenes that drag on too long detract from otherwise excellent writing. I have no doubt that both extremes existed but Reymont never ceases to make the comparisons.* I am glad I read the work and some of the characters will stay with me. But in the end I think The Peasants is (only) enjoyable and occasionally quite satisfying—my way of damning the work with faint praise (an English idiom meaning to criticize while appearing to praise). It is well-written and easy to read; after reading the first volume in the century old first English translation, I read the rest in the new Zaranko [2022] translation which is extremely well annotated, although the translator’s very peculiar choice to cast some of the dialect in the vocabulary and syntax of the Pennines of northern England—no, I’m (sadly) not kidding—is regularly and predictably more than a little jarring. You will enjoy the books…but I predict that not much will stay with you.
(*This raises a point that I think is fascinating although it is tangential here: the impact of editors on literary fiction. They haven’t been around all that long. The fact that some of the world’s greatest writers wrote and published what they did without the benefit (and I use that word with caution) of a good editor makes their work that much more impressive. I can’t help wonder what our estimation of Hemingway or Fitzgerald or Wolfe would be if Max Perkins had not been their editor. Or Faulkner or Eugene O’Neill without Saxe Commins.) show less