Customer Reviews

Pig Earth

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This book is part of trilogy - Pig Earth, In Europa, Lilac and Flag - depicting the erosion of traditional peasant culture and the incorporation of the children of the peasantry into modern urban life. Taken together, these books comprise a kind of fictionalized sociology of modernization. Each of these books describes a different aspect of this process. The first book, Pig Earth, describes the traditional life of poor French peasants from the Savoy region. Pig Earth is a series of stories and poems showing the seasonal routine of labor, the close relationship of other aspects of peasant life to seasonal labors, and relatively closed nature of these communities. The latter is shown to have both positive and negative aspects, a combination of social solidarity and insularity. The second book, In Europa, is a series of stories showing the penetration of modern industrial civilization into the life of the peasantry and recounts some of the costs, and benefits, of this process. The last book, Lilac and Flag, is set in a mythical city, called Troy, which has aspects of many modern cities. Lilac and Flag describes the life of a young couple, the descendents of poor peasants, who now live a marginal existence in the metropolis of Troy. Overall, this is a successful set of books. Berger is a very talented writer and this set of books gives a vivid sense of the important transition from peasant life on the land to modern industrial civilization. Berger's attempt to depict this important social process is really admirable. The books do vary somewhat in quality. In Europa is probably the best, containing a number of powerful stories, with Pig Earth coming a close second. Lilac and Flag is probably the least effective. The style, presumably a correlate of the urban setting, is distinctly different and the plot has surreal elements. I suspect that Lilac and Flag will strike many readers as relatively familiar and conventional where the contents of Pig Earth and In Europa are relatively novel. If I were to read just one of these books, I would pick In Europa.

It is important to realize that Berger is describing the tail of a process with roots in the Renaissance and that accelerated tremendously in the 19th century. The traditional life described in Pig Earth is actually a life that has been greatly affected by industrial civilization. Many men in the community described by Berger participate in seasonal labor in large cities, there is compulsory primary education, and the local church has a strong influence. Other aspects of the modern world intrude themselves. These include military service, railroads and it is likely that farm products are produced for an international market. In the early or even mid-19th century, a community like this would have been completely geographically isolated, illiterate, and probably would speak a language distinct from French. There are some other fine books devoted to this topic. Eugen Weber's excellent Peasants into Frenchman is a very interesting and readable social history of the impact of the modern world on the French peasantry. A detailed view of French peasant life can be found in Pierre Helias The Horse of Pride, a combined ethnography and memoir about a Breton peasant community written by a scholar who was the son of Breton peasants.

"Pig Earth", by John Berger is the first of 3 books written over a fifteen-year period that taken together form the trilogy, "Into Their Labours". The setting for the first volume is a small village in the French Alps containing a collection of stories about the traditional life of peasants in their village. The books taken together offer a sweeping view of what has happened to this group of people, and as the Author notes, with small changes in detail these stories could be of peasants and their economy anywhere in the world.

The, "economy", of the peasant is the keystone not only of their monetary well being, it also is the foundation that supports their culture, their way of life. It is the means by which they are able to stay away from the cities and there industrialization, the village maintains the individual, the city destroys him or her. This first book shows the life of the Alpine Village intact even as it foreshadows its demise.

There are great ranges of stories that cover daily life, the 24-hour a day commitment that their lives require, and in the end a three-part story that illustrates what will be the downfall of the village. This three-part story is particularly fascinating for the Village disciplines one of its own that they have labeled with a superstitious moniker. When they carry out her isolation from the Village, she adapts, embraces ways different from those who have scorned her, and in the end the destruction of the Alpine Village and its way of life is gone, and those who live there do not yet realize it.

This book is an interesting hybrid that includes poetry interspersed among the traditional prose of a novel. I am not a reader of poetry so the only compliment I can pay this portion of Mr. Berger's work, is that I enjoyed it. He placed and wrote the poems in such a manner that they read without breaking the cadence of the larger work.

This work contains an element that the Author notes is a relic of the Nineteenth Century, even as he mourns the passing of the practice. In a section named, "Historical Afterword", the Author explains his book. What he says about his book I will leave to those who choose to read this man's work. However his Philosophy on what books have become is interesting and very accurate in my estimation as well. Many I know will find what he says offensive as they read that of which he speaks. He talks of how it is assumed that literature has elevated itself into pure art, however he believes it has degenerated into pure entertainment. Of one example he gives, is his feeling that Authors who believe their work of imagination to be all that a reader needs. He finds this attitude insulting to the, "dignity of the reader, the experience communicated, and the writer". He follows this with an essay on his book, which is brilliant, demonstrates the talent of this man not only as a writer but also as a pure thinker. If he had a bookstore I believe I would like it. Of course it would be small and would contain only books worth the time they take to read, and the expense they are to the reader. Some may find this statement arrogant, but for those whom do, I suggest you read his thoughts as many times as it takes to agree with his idea. For all this man advocates is quality work and Authors that respect their readers.

This trilogy took 15 years to accomplish and it has been awarded appropriately. Even while writing this he penned other works that won The Booker Award amongst others. This man is one of the great Authors living today; however if 15 years for three slender volumes seems absurd then try the alternative, alphabet books. A is for atrocious, B is for botched, C is for contrived, through Z is for zero, representing value received.

I approached this book, knowing that John Berger was a Marxist, with the fear that I would be treated to pages of dogma about how the realities of modern capitolism were destroying the pre-industrial arcadia of provincial France. Luckily, he is much more subtle than this. He doesn't rant about the value of the peasant world; he simply gets it across exactly the way it is. I never for a second felt that he was romanticizing the lives of the residents. And while the prose is beautiful, Berger never poeticizes the reality of peasant life - slaughtering animals, finding water pipes, getting goats to breed (notice the decidedly un-romanticized title); he allows us, however, to see why these tasks have their own beauty, their own value.

It is ironic that a book so anchored in realism should have its greatest success with a work of fantasy: the stories that make up The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol are all masterpieces, and allow Pig Earth to be more than just a lovely work of journalism.

The only thing I felt detracted from the coherence and overall quality of the book was the poetry. Berger is a fine poet, but not a great one; he is, however, a great writer of prose. I was generally much more impressed with the stories than the poetry, and didn't think many of the poems were of enough merit to be included.

The sadness one feels at the close of this book is an earned sadness. What I mean by this is that Berger succesfully makes one feel, without saying a single word about it, that it is truly a shame that this world will probably not exist for much longer, that farming will probably done by a few people who will be pushing buttons on machines instead of living the traditional life of a peasant. Obviously, this is inevitable, but this book is a worthwhile reminder that progress comes at a cost, as well as being a wonderful read.

In the 1970s the English novelist and art critic John Berger moved to a rural community in the French Alps. Berger wanted to see peasant society firsthad, and to take part in their work as to better understand the challenges they face and the traditions they maintain. While there, he began writing a trilogy called "Into Their Labours" ("Others have laboured and ye are entered into their labours" - John 4:38). PIG EARTH, published in 1979, is the first volume.

While referred to as a novel, it is really a collection of eight short stories and one novella. These share a similar setting but which do not overlap in plot or characters. In between each story Berger has interspersed poems, and at the end of the book he has placed a "Historical Afterword". The short stories here are generally entertaining. Berger in no way romanticizes peasant life. These are not jolly people wearing stainless national costumes and singing about how good life is. Rather, they are draw as people whose lives mix joy and sorrow evenly, and the conditions in which they live--packed in a room with livestock, urinating openly, drinking in abundance, butchering livestock--are straightfowardly presented. While Berger is generally known for his Marxist views, he thankfully injects no inflammatory rhetoric into his fiction. In fact, the one character in the book who calls for communist revolution is an intellectual city boy that the peasants laugh at.

Nonetheless, the novel is in no way flawless. Berger's poetry, free verse reminiscent of Gary Snyder, is unmemorable and could have been left out. The novella which ends the story, "The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol" begins as a story of a dwarf and how her village treats her, but unconvincingly veers off into magical realism. Finaly, his historical afterword, an essay explaining his views on the economy of peasant society, is dull reading after the entertaining stories, and he would have done better to integrate his views better into his fiction.

Nonetheless, if you find peasant societies intriguing--as I do, a linguist who often visits rural areas in Europe for fieldwork--this is a novel worth reading. In spite of my discontent over some portions, I'm going to move ahead to the next volume in the trilogy, Once in Europa.

Over 1500m above where Vispertal meets Mattertal lies Törbel, which may once have been the second most beautiful village in the Alps. In the winter of 1988 when the alleys between the log houses, barns and stables were covered with dirty snow, farmers wearing red/white bandanas on their heads walked at dusk from stables to the milk coop with metal milk cans on their shoulders. Farming for survival had ended. Most worked daily in the chemical factories in the Rhone Valley and only farmed on the side. In December of 1996 we gave a copy the German translation of John Berger's trilogy (Pig Earth/Once in Europa/Lilac and Flag) to Bruno, the last full-time farmer in Törbel. After reading one or two stories he said, more or less, so what. That's just how it is! What the farmer sees as simple truth, John Berger has transformed into a clear and very beautiful work of art for the rest of us. Berger wrote elsewhere that "...the principal function of painting, ..., was...to make as if continually present, what soon was to be absent". His description of the death of Bauernleben is unparalleled, especially for those of us who lost the Heimat when the grandparents died. I would like to go to the village where the people gather in the Republican Lyra to drink and talk. I want to know if the Cockadrille, like Bruno (in "Lieber Alex") really lived. I expect that she did, but in the form of more than one woman. I hope someday to find and wander through that village, not entirely by accident.

"Pig Earth" is the first novel of Berger's trilogy, "Into Their Labours" (made up of the novels Pig Earth, Once in Europa, & Lilac and Flag). It is set in a small French village on the impossibly steep slopes of the alpine Haute Savoie region where I lived for five years. Not that living somewhere for so brief a period makes me an authority but, for me, every sentence rang with authenticity. The attitudes, the world-view, the Weltanschauung of Savoyards are beautifully rendered. Berger has been accused of romanticizing the lives of peasants, but I think such critics are mistaken. While Berger's writing style is lyric, indeed, poetic (a number of poems are in fact scattered through the prose), the lives he describes, albeit in lush, sensuous prose, are harsh, exhausting, dirty, sometimes violent, filled with excrement and the scent of butchering, and frequently filled with regret and longing. (Reading these splendidly-written vignettes I cannot help but realize how ill-prepared I would be for such a life.)

Of particular poignancy are the pieces describing the lives (sic) of Lucie Cabrol, known as the Cocadrille. Consider this excerpt:

"Again she said my name as she had said it forty years before and again it separated me, marked me out from all other men. In the mountains the past is never behind, it's always to the side. You come down from the forest at dusk and a dog is barking in a hamlet. A century ago in the same spot at the same time of day, a dog, when it heard a man coming down through the forest, was barking, and the interval between the two occasions is no more than a pause in the barking."

The reader should not skip the somewhat academic introduction, for it is here that Berger outlines his motivations for writing the book and his philosophy towards what he terms "peasant life." Although he does not gloss over its hardships, he does hold that such a life offers independence, autonomy, perspective, community, and pride in one's store of inherited knowledge. He does believe that the disappearance of this way of life, which he suggests is inevitable, will be a great loss to us all.

Such incites are scatted throughout the stories as well, for example:

"At home, in the village, it is you who do everything, and the way you do it gives you a certain authority. There are accidents and many things are beyond your control, but it is you who have to deal with the consequences even of these. When you arrive in the city, where so much is happening and so much is being done and shifted, you realize with astonishment that nothing is in your control. It is like being a bee against a window pane. You see the events, the colours, the lights, yet something, which you can't see, separates you. With the peasant it is the forced suspension of his habit of handling and doing. That's why his hands dangle out of his cuffs so stupidly."

This slim volume is well worth the effort, and if Berger has erred in any way, it is perhaps in his desperation to make us experience what he has experienced as he lives and farms on this land himself. It is reminiscent, in this way, of Agee's "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men."

In the 1970s the English novelist and art critic John Berger moved to a rural community in the French Alps. Berger wanted to see peasant society firsthad, and to take part in their work as to better understand the challenges they face and the traditions they maintain. While there, he began writing a trilogy called "Into Their Labours" ("Others have laboured and ye are entered into their labours" - John 4:38). PIG EARTH, published in 1979, is the first volume.

While referred to as a novel, it is really a collection of eight short stories and one novella. These share a similar setting but which do not overlap in plot or characters. In between each story Berger has interspersed poems, and at the end of the book he has placed a "Historical Afterword". The short stories here are generally entertaining. Berger in no way romanticizes peasant life. These are not jolly people wearing stainless national costumes and singing about how good life is. Rather, they are draw as people whose lives mix joy and sorrow evenly, and the conditions in which they live--packed in a room with livestock, urinating openly, drinking in abundance, butchering livestock--are straightfowardly presented. While Berger is generally known for his Marxist views, he thankfully injects no inflammatory rhetoric into his fiction. In fact, the one character in the book who calls for communist revolution is an intellectual city boy that the peasants laugh at.

Nonetheless, the novel is in no way flawless. Berger's poetry, free verse reminiscent of Gary Snyder, is unmemorable and could have been left out. The novella which ends the story, "The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol" begins as a story of a dwarf and how her village treats her, but unconvincingly veers off into magical realism. Finaly, his historical afterword, an essay explaining his views on the economy of peasant society, is dull reading after the entertaining stories, and he would have done better to integrate his views better into his fiction.

Nonetheless, if you find peasant societies intriguing--as I do, a linguist who often visits rural areas in Europe for fieldwork--this is a novel worth reading. In spite of my discontent over some portions, I'm going to move ahead to the next volume in the trilogy, Once in Europa.

Amongst the considerable virtues of Berger's,'Pig Earth', is his first transcendant fiction to emerge from his experience of the alpine village in peasant France. This is,'The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol', which has, this year, been reformatted as a stage piece for British Theatre as part of the celebrations for its author's work, in his 78th year. Berger's prose throughout the peasant trilogy('Into Their Labour') is characteristically taut, blunt and weighted with what seems like peasant wisdom. Contrivance, theatricality, are put to one side. Cabrol, a dwarf nicnamed, the Cocadrille, is an eccentric in a community which is forced, against its will to accomodate her. If cruel judgement is mete upon her, she is, by temperament and ingenuity, capable of exacting just revenge. Berger explains that his relocation from the London art world of the 70s, to the rural life, far from slumming with the poor, was to be close to and absorb the other subject of his life's passion, the underclass: ie. to speak with a more authentic voice. Cabrol possesses total dimension. Berger has a tendency, in some stories of this trilogy, to proseletyze in his anxiety to place before us the plight of the disappearing peasant communities. His preface and endpiece, in this sense, are possibly redundant these days.His work has been out there for some time. In the Cabrol piece he speaks from within, with deep compassion, humour, and immediacy. Her third life is one of the most poignant and imaginative pieces in the Berger canon. There was a tele-doc. on the author about the time,'King' was published, which reviewed his public life. Picture Berger ca 1960, back on the B & W BBC box in a white turtle neck, sparring before an old masterpiece with the grey-suited High Priest of the British art establishment, Lord Kenneth Clark. Even then Berger possessed the crouched shoulder, the flurry of gestures, the idefatigable energy to burrow into the cherished notions of the elite. He refused to assume received wisdom. I admire his tenacity, tact, and honesty. His questing keeps him forever young.

Berger trained as a painter, and that training seems to be reflected in his attention to detail, and skill in unfolding his stories. This book came to me highly recommended, and it did not disappoint.

In the 1970s the English novelist and art critic John Berger moved to a rural community in the French Alps. Berger wanted to see peasant society firsthad, and to take part in their work as to better understand the challenges they face and the traditions they maintain. While there, he began writing a trilogy called "Into Their Labours" ("Others have laboured and ye are entered into their labours" - John 4:38). PIG EARTH, published in 1979, is the first volume.

While referred to as a novel, it is really a collection of eight short stories and one novella. These share a similar setting but which do not overlap in plot or characters. In between each story Berger has interspersed poems, and at the end of the book he has placed a "Historical Afterword". The short stories here are generally entertaining. Berger in no way romanticizes peasant life. These are not jolly people wearing stainless national costumes and singing about how good life is. Rather, they are draw as people whose lives mix joy and sorrow evenly, and the conditions in which they live--packed in a room with livestock, urinating openly, drinking in abundance, butchering livestock--are straightfowardly presented. While Berger is generally known for his Marxist views, he thankfully injects no inflammatory rhetoric into his fiction. In fact, the one character in the book who calls for communist revolution is an intellectual city boy that the peasants laugh at.

Nonetheless, the novel is in no way flawless. Berger's poetry, free verse reminiscent of Gary Snyder, is unmemorable and could have been left out. The novella which ends the story, "The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol" begins as a story of a dwarf and how her village treats her, but unconvincingly veers off into magical realism. Finaly, his historical afterword, an essay explaining his views on the economy of peasant society, is dull reading after the entertaining stories, and he would have done better to integrate his views better into his fiction.

Nonetheless, if you find peasant societies intriguing--as I do, a linguist who often visits rural areas in Europe for fieldwork--this is a novel worth reading. In spite of my discontent over some portions, I'm going to move ahead to the next volume in the trilogy, Once in Europa.