Word: giono
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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This pessimistic view of contemporary life is even further pointed up by the fact that the other writers in this book deliberately turn their backs on it. André Gide and Noel Devaulx hide their talented heads in reminiscences of life before World War I. Nature-Boys Jean Giono and André Chamson wallow in a woody dreamland of hefty peasants and prime wine. Only Jean Cassou gives an impression of both vitality and veracity. His macabre story is an up-to-date version of Romeo & Juliet, in which Juliet ("a nice, retiring person . . . the sort who hates being conspicuous...
...present book is an autobiographical fragment in the same vein. The Blue Boy of the title is Giono himself. His father runs a little cobbler shop. His mother operates a small home laundry. Through neighbors he learns to distinguish Bach from Mozart, Scarlatti from Rameau. A strange, dark visitor to his father's shop gives him Hesiod, Homer and the Bible to read...
With the Massots and with his parents, Jean begins to observe the Giono world. It is a world of good & evil, of working men and working women "all pressed, atom against atom, as in an enormous pomegranate." He learns about the baker's wife who ran off with a man. He sees a wheelwright trying to crucify...
...Giono's world is a distorted, highly individual world, fascinating to the reluctant city-dweller, but real enough in terms of Giono's thesis that the "whole happiness of man" is in fields, hills and the "little valleys...
...Pacifist Giono was soon released from jail and allowed to go on with his writing. According to some, he became a collaborationist, a spokesman for Vichy and Pétain. According to others he worked with the Underground. Many Frenchmen regard his politics as still suspect. Says he in Blue Boy (1932): "There is no glory in being French. There is only one glory: in being alive...