Word: giono
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Jean Giono has been called the French Thoreau. Giono's dusty Provençal towns and Alpine foothills are a long way from Walden Pond, but he writes with a Thoreau-like conviction that the only good life is the "natural" (non-city) life. And like Thoreau, who once spent a night in jail for refusing to pay his poll tax, Giono went to jail rather than obey his government's mobilization order in September...
...Giono has little of Thoreau's warm passion for facts of nature, even less of his intellectual Puritanism. Born in 1895, at Manosque, Basses-Alpes, of French-Italian stock, Giono is essentially a nature-loving mystic. He is a teller of wry, earthy stories of the peasants in whom he professes to see the joy of the good life embodied. He has written about these people, sometimes bafflingly but always with zest and imagination, in The Song of the World, Harvest, and Joy of Man's Desiring...
...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...