Peter Owen Modern Classic
2 total works
Two brothers, Marceau and Ange Jason are members of a family renowned and respected for its brutality and bound together with ties stronger than than those of ordinary brotherly love. Yet this affection turns to hatred after Marceau kills a wild horse with a single blow at a country fair and becomes the local wrestling champion. As his strength increases and his fame spreads, the younger sibling's jealously causes this bond to snap. The end, when it comes, is a violent - and deadly - confrontation.
Long regarded as one of France's finest writers of the twentieth century, Jean Giono is best known for his ecological bestseller The Man Who Planted Trees, but this neglected classic, published in 1931, is his masterpiece. Set during the First World War, conscription comes to a rural Provencal community, and its young men leave for the trenches on the Western Front. Based on his experiences at the battle of Verdun, at which he was one of only eleven survivors from his company, Giono produced one of the most powerful and affecting accounts of war ever written. This unflinchingly realistic yet at times intensely poetic novel grimly contrasts the destruction of men, land and animals at the front with the disintegration of daily life and accepted morality back home in a remote community with its own savagery, lusts and yearnings. Giono ends his masterwork with a message of hope, reflecting his faith in the ability of the earth to renew itself, which readers of The Man Who Planted Trees will find familiar.
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