{"product_id":"ennemonde-isbn-9781953861122","title":"Ennemonde","description":"\u003cb\u003eOne of the final novellas by the acclaimed French writer Jean Giono,\u003ci\u003e Ennemonde\u003c\/i\u003e is a fierce and jubilant portrait of a life intensely lived\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEnnemonde Girard: Obese. Toothless. Razor-sharp. Loving mother and  murderous wife: a character like none other in literature. In telling us  Ennemonde’s astounding story of undetected crimes, Jean Giono immerses  us in the perverse and often lurid lifeways of the people of the High  Country, where vengeance is an art form, hearts are superfluous, and  only boldness and cunning such as Ennemonde’s can win the day. A  gleeful, broad sardonic grin of a novel.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\"Roads move cautiously around the High Country...\" So begins the story of Ennemonde, but also of her sons, daughters, neighbors, lovers, and enemies, and especially of the mountains that stand guard behind their home in the Camargue. This is a place of stark and terrifying beauty, where violence strikes suddenly, whether from the hand of a neighbor or from the sky itself.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eGiono captures every wrinkle, glare, and glance with wry delight, celebrating the uniquely tough people whose eyes sparkle with the cruel majesty of the landscape. Full of delectable detours and startling insights, \u003ci\u003eEnnemonde\u003c\/i\u003e will take you by the hand for an unforgettable tour of this master novelist's singular world.\"[Bill Johnston's] translation is never static; it captures or even reveals the suspense and the passion present in the original work . . . Defying the stereotype of a strictly Provençal, folkloric, local writer, Giono reveals his entire cultural universe with great abandon and relish.\" \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e-- Alice-Catherine Carls, \u003ci\u003eWorld Literature Today\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"\u003ci\u003eEnnemonde\u003c\/i\u003e is a novel of nature, a novel that might tells us something about the gap between\u003cbr\u003e humanity and its environs . . . The sky is black, the trees – beeches, chestnuts, sessile oaks –\u003cbr\u003e are infinite, the rocks reverberate, and the peasants are murderous . . . We are in the realm of a naturalized Nietzsche here: what is valuable is what sustains and enhances life . . . Giono troubles us, asks us to pay attention, and finally . . . Giono shows us what one can see if one \u003ci\u003elooks\u003c\/i\u003e.\"\u003cbr\u003e--\u003cb\u003eDuncan Stuart, \u003ci\u003eExit Only\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Giono's writing possesses a vigor, a surprising texture, a contagious joy, a sureness of touch and design, an arresting originality, and that sort of unfeigned strangeness that always goes along with sincerity when it escapes from the ruts of convention.\"\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e--André Gide, unpublished letter\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"For Giono, literature and reality overlap the way that waves sweep over the shore, one ceaselessly refreshing the other and, in certain wondrous moments, giving it a glassy clearness.\" \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e--Ryu Spaeth, The New Republic\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\"Giono's voice is the voice of the realist; his accents are the accents of simplicity, power and a passionate feeling for a land and a people that he must love as well as understand.\" \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e--\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Giono's prose is a singularly fine blend of realism and poetic sensibility. Essentially a poet, he has an acute faculty of penetration, a lucidity of spiritual vision, and a tender sympathy.\"\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e--The Washington Post\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Giono offers a steady flow of rich imagery and biographical tidbits about the denizens of a mountainous region of southwestern France in this sensual pastoral . . . The characters often feel like a manifestation of the rugged land they inhabit: the farm girl Ennemonde, for instance, born near the turn of the 20th century, possesses “a fruitlike beauty.”. . . Giono achieves an engaging and worldly narration, which grounds the reader in this juicy web of anecdotes.\"\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e \u003cbr\u003e--Publishers Weekly\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \"This sharp little book marks a return to [Giono's] naturalistic themes, but with a bitter bite . . . \u003ci\u003eEnnemonde\u003c\/i\u003e hurtles onward, clause piled on descriptive clause, as if in every great arabesque of a sentence Giono were trying to encompass the whole of Provence. But he isn’t aiming for grace; no, it’s all spiteful glee in these lines . . . a riotous book.\"\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e–- Robert Rubsam, \u003ci\u003eThe Baffler\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Giono creates an atmosphere that is both contemporaneous and timeless...the epic instinct is active.\" \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e--Ray C. B. Brown \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"I'm reading Bill Johnston's translation of Jean Giono's \u003ci\u003eEnnemonde\u003c\/i\u003e, and have come to love the way Giono nestles a kernel of a story inside descriptions of the natural world and its inhabitants, human and otherwise. These plots are organic; they grow out of the soil.\" \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e--Stephen Sparks of Point Reyes Books via Twitter\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\"The land, rough and wet and unparsable, is what dominates [Giono's] novels, dictating the movement of the plot and the development of the characters. Sitting somewhere between the psychologism of Proust or Gide and the realism of Zola, Giono’s dramas unfold as if the inanimate world were itself the primordial life-breath of the animate one . . .  a superb English translation by Bill Johnston . . . \u003ci\u003eEnnemonde\u003c\/i\u003e is a novel about peasantry and the old Gionian world, but it is also one about art and writing themselves—about the acts of observing, of developing a scale.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003cb\u003e-- Ben Libman, \u003ci\u003eThe Review of Uncontemporary Fiction\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\"Even when it feels like the narrator is insulting, criticizing, belittling his rural characters, he is actually breaking them loose from the virtuous and the picturesque. Characters pull the sleight of hand of disappearing into their own environment, knowing nature for something other than scenery, impulse for something other than joyrides . . . The bitter tone of the book, mixed with the transcendently lovely descriptions that are so typical of Giono, has me wanting more than ever to situate the author in his past, present, future . . . [Ennemonde] feels like the culmination of several lifelong struggles.\"\u003cb\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003e--Abby Walthausen, \u003ci\u003e\u003ci\u003eAsymptote\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\"A tour de force in [its] own fashion . . .  Giono (or Gallimard) calls [\u003ci\u003eEnnemonde\u003c\/i\u003e] a novel but it feels more like a collection of legends, a discursive anthology of the stories told in and about the real and imaginary place called the High Country, and another, distinctly low place called the Camargue.\"\u003cb\u003e — \u003cb\u003eMichael Wood, \u003ci\u003eThe London Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003eJEAN  GIONO was born and lived most of his life in the town of Manosque,  Alpes-de-Haute-Provence. Largely self-educated, he started working as a  bank clerk at the age of sixteen and reported for military service when  World War I broke out. After the success of Hill, which won the Prix  Brentano, he left the bank and began to publish prolifically. Imprisoned  at the beginning of the Second World War for his pacifist views, he was  once again wrongly imprisoned for collaboration with the Vichy  government and held without charges at the war's end. Despite being  blacklisted after his release, Giono continued writing and achieved  renewed success. He was elected to the Académie Goncourt in 1954.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBill Johnston is the Chair of the Comparative Literature Department at Indiana University. His translations include Wieslaw Mysliwski's \u003ci\u003eStone Upon Stone\u003c\/i\u003e, and Magdalens Tulli's \u003ci\u003eDreams and Stones, Moving Parts, Flaw\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eIn Red\u003c\/i\u003e. His 2008 translation of Tadeusz Różewicz's new poems won the inaugural Found in Translation Prize and was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Poetry Award.Journeys are not undertaken\u003cbr\u003elightly in the High Country. Farms may be five or ten miles\u003cbr\u003efrom their nearest neighbor. Often it would be one solitary man\u003cbr\u003etraveling those miles to see another solitary man; he never does\u003cbr\u003ethis even once in his life. Or else it’d be a whole tribe of adults,\u003cbr\u003echildren, and old people setting off toward another whole tribe\u003cbr\u003eof adults, children, old people – to see what? Women demolished\u003cbr\u003eby repeated pregnancies, red-faced\u003cbr\u003emen, and crooked old folks\u003cbr\u003e(and children too) – only to be looked down on by them? The\u003cbr\u003ehell with that. If anyone wants to show themselves, they’ll do it at\u003cbr\u003ethe markets. Twenty, twenty-five\u003cbr\u003emiles separate the villages that\u003cbr\u003eneatly line the circuit formed by the road.\u003cbr\u003eIn the surrounding country there are beech trees, chestnuts,\u003cbr\u003esessile oaks – beeches that grow more massive the farther out\u003cbr\u003eyou go, sessiles that are ever more ancient; far removed from any\u003cbr\u003edealings with men, there are families of birches that are lovely\u003cbr\u003ein summer and that disappear, white against white, in the snow.\u003cbr\u003eOn the moors there’s lavender, broom, esparto, sedge, dandelion,\u003cbr\u003eand then rocks, rounded rocks, as if long ago, up in these\u003cbr\u003eheights, great rivers used to pass through; then finally, in the\u003cbr\u003egreat open spaces are flat rocks, resonant as bells, that repeat the\u003cbr\u003eslightest sound – the hop of a cricket, the patter of a mouse, the\u003cbr\u003eslithering of an adder, or the wind glancing off these terrestrial\u003cbr\u003espringboards.\u003cbr\u003eThe sky is often black, or at least dark blue, though giving the\u003cbr\u003eimpression black would give – except during the blooming of\u003cbr\u003ethe wild mignonette, whose exquisite scent is so joyful it dispels\u003cbr\u003eall melancholy. The time of the mignonette aside, fine weather\u003cbr\u003eis not cheerful in these parts; nor is it sad, it’s something else;\u003cbr\u003ethose who find it to their liking can no longer do without it. Bad\u003cbr\u003eweather is thoroughly seductive too, immediately assuming as it\u003cbr\u003edoes a cosmic air. There’s something galactic, extra-galactic\u003cbr\u003eeven,\u003cbr\u003ein the way it behaves. It cannot rain here the way it does elsewhere\u003cbr\u003e– you sense that God personally sees to it; here the wind\u003cbr\u003ematter-of-factly\u003cbr\u003etakes the fate of the world in hand. The storm\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eadapts its ways here: it doesn’t flash, doesn’t make any noise; simply,\u003cbr\u003emetallic objects begin to gleam – belt buckles, lace hooks onshoes, clasps, eyeglasses, bracelets, rings, chains. . . ; you have to\u003cbr\u003emind how you go. You often find twenty, even thirty magnificent\u003cbr\u003ebeeches struck by lightning all in a row, dead from head to foot,\u003cbr\u003eburned to a cinder, upright, black, bearing witness to the fact\u003cbr\u003ethat things happen in that silence.\u003cbr\u003eDusk is more often green than red, and goes on for a very\u003cbr\u003elong time – so long that in the end you can’t help noticing that\u003cbr\u003enight has fallen and that now the light is coming from the stars.\u003cbr\u003eIn these parts the stars light your way; they’re bright enough for\u003cbr\u003epeople to recognize each other when their paths cross. It may be\u003cbr\u003ethat you see more stars here than elsewhere; in any case, they’re\u003cbr\u003ecertainly larger, for there’s something about the air – whether\u003cbr\u003eits purity, which is exceptional, renders the constellations more\u003cbr\u003evivid or whether, as some claim, it contains some substance\u003cbr\u003ethat acts like a magnifying glass. Naturally, no one’s going to\u003cbr\u003eboast about having been way out in the open in the depths of\u003cbr\u003enight. Whenever they see it coming on, people skedaddle home\u003cbr\u003ebefore it arrives. There’s a way of behaving toward this land that\u003cbr\u003ewas perfected by our ancestors and that has produced excellent\u003cbr\u003eresults; indeed, it’s the only way: you shape yourself to it. Every\u003cbr\u003eaccident that’s been seen to happen here – and they’re countless\u003cbr\u003ein number, including many that are strange indeed – comes from\u003cbr\u003esome infringement of these sorts of rules or laws.\u003cbr\u003eThere’s nothing more straightforward for example than going\u003cbr\u003efrom Villesèche to the Pas de Redortier in daylight; it’ll take you\u003cbr\u003ean hour at most. The landscape isn’t exactly cheerful, but it’s\u003cbr\u003edoable; all it needs is a bit of will, or passion (if it’s for hunting),\u003cbr\u003eor foolishness (if it’s for no reason). But on a day when the\u003cbr\u003eclouds are low and dense, and night falls, try then! No one will\u003cbr\u003echance it.\u003cbr\u003eThe tool that people around here have most often in their\u003cbr\u003ehand is a shotgun, whether it’s for hunting or for, let’s say, philosophical\u003cbr\u003ereflection; in either case, there’s no solution without\u003cbr\u003ea shot being fired. The gun hangs from the stem of a wineglass\u003cbr\u003ethat’s been embedded in the wall near the chair where the man\u003cbr\u003eof the house sits. Whether this chair is at the table or by the\u003cbr\u003efireplace, the shotgun is always within arm’s reach. It’s not that\u003cbr\u003ethe region is unsafe because of a lack of police; on the contrary,\u003cbr\u003eeven in the heyday of banditry there was never any crime up\u003cbr\u003ehere, except for one incident in 1928, and that one was precisely\u003cbr\u003eabout what everyone is afraid of. Everyone is afraid of loneliness.\u003cbr\u003eFamilies are no solution: at most they’re collections of lonesome\u003cbr\u003epeople who in reality are each heading in their own direction.\u003cbr\u003eFamilies don’t come together around someone; they separate as\u003cbr\u003ethey move away from someone. Then there’s metaphysics – and\u003cbr\u003enot the Sorbonne kind, rather the sort you have to bear in mind\u003cbr\u003ein confronting irredeemable solitude and the outside world.\u003cbr\u003eMonsieur Sartre would not be of much use here; a shotgun, on\u003cbr\u003ethe other hand, comes in handy in many situations.\u003cbr\u003eIt might seem surprising that these peasants don’t grasp the\u003cbr\u003ehandles of a plow. The reason is that the peasants are shepherds.\u003cbr\u003eThat’s also what keeps them beyond (and above) technological\u003cbr\u003eprogress. No one has yet invented a machine for minding\u003cbr\u003esheep. The father, head of the family, oversees the flock; the son\u003cbr\u003eor sons are in charge of the small farm that in fact functions as a\u003cbr\u003eclosed economy. People only till the acreage necessary for enough\u003cbr\u003ewheat, barley, potatoes, and vegetables to meet the needs of the\u003cbr\u003efamily or the individual, and that is why so many of the peasants\u003cbr\u003eremain unmarried, living alone: in this way they have need of so\u003cbr\u003elittle that they spend no more than one month a year scraping\u003cbr\u003ethe earth.","brand":"Archipelago","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46301606019301,"sku":"NP9781953861122","price":16.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781953861122.jpg?v=1767726302","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/ennemonde-isbn-9781953861122","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}