Pig Earth
With this haunting first volume in his Into Their Labours trilogy, John Berger begins his chronicle of the eclipse of peasant cultures in the twentieth century. Set in a small village in the French Alps, Pig Earth relates the stories of skeptical, hard-working men and fiercely independent women; of calves born and pigs slaughtered; of summer haymaking and long dark winters of rest; of the message of forgiveness from a dead father to his prodigal son; and of the marvelous Lucie Cabrol, exiled to a hut high in the mountains, an inexorable part of the lives of men who have known her. Above all, this masterpiece of sensuous description and profound moral resonance is an act of reckoning that conveys the precise wealth and weight of a world we are losing.
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Community Reviews
Reread this in two days and kicked myself for ever thinking this only merited a mere 4 stars; in hindsight, I know now that such a slighted judgement only could’ve been one obfuscated by the ever-perennial distraction of my material conditions overtaking primacy (a month ago lol).
Berger is by far the best English-language writer I have ever read, paralleled only by Nabokov (whose English works - even if self-translated - nevertheless can’t help but leave behind deposits of the scantest immaterial, uniquely-Russian, essence that makes his genius lost through the process of linguistic interpellation, as all translations do).
Every chapter encapsules a peasant vignette through the waxing and waning cycles of life and death, and every chapter is followed by a short, free-versed poem as intermission.
The resulting accumulative effect is almost as poignant as the prose embedded within it: Pig Earth is more than mere elegy, and more than mere tribute to the now-anachronistic trope of the peasant.
Now I’m too dumb to say what that “more” is, but I can identify a transcendental work when I read one.
This one earns an official *Borat voice*: Very Nice!
Berger is by far the best English-language writer I have ever read, paralleled only by Nabokov (whose English works - even if self-translated - nevertheless can’t help but leave behind deposits of the scantest immaterial, uniquely-Russian, essence that makes his genius lost through the process of linguistic interpellation, as all translations do).
Every chapter encapsules a peasant vignette through the waxing and waning cycles of life and death, and every chapter is followed by a short, free-versed poem as intermission.
The resulting accumulative effect is almost as poignant as the prose embedded within it: Pig Earth is more than mere elegy, and more than mere tribute to the now-anachronistic trope of the peasant.
Now I’m too dumb to say what that “more” is, but I can identify a transcendental work when I read one.
This one earns an official *Borat voice*: Very Nice!
