Word: giono
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...DESIRING-Jean Giono -Viking...
Prose Poem. Jean Giono was arrested last September (TIME, Oct. 23), to prevent his leading a band of his French peasant neighbors in a flat refusal to go to war. (He was released in November.) Last fall the innocent movie version of his innocent novel Harvest was shown at a few U. S. theatres. Joy of Man's Desiring, published in France in 1935, though in form a novel, is about as intense and unabashed a poem as any prose could...
...useless beauty, in the purity of animals. Carried away by his precept and example, the farmers reduce their planting to what they can eat, turn their animals loose, crowd their fallow land with narcissi, make friends with a stag and his doe. Having set up his earthly paradise, Giono regretfully proceeds in his closing chapters to knock it to pieces. He does so none too logically. Jean Giono has a genius for observing, and recording, the splendors of the natural world, the beauty of natural tasks and pleasures. The book has been given an excellent translation...