Een ware verteller die toch literair blijft! Véél hogere kwaliteit dan de 'Vlaamse' Timmermans, Streuvels of Claes...
Totaal andere benadering dan de Vlamingen, die totaal in de schaduw staan van Berger John. ( )

Inspiration to read: NYTBR 'By the book' interview with Gabrielle Hamilton. http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/11/23/books/review/gabrielle-hamilton-by-the-book...

Question: "What books do you find yourself returning to again and again?"
Response: "John Berger’s “Pig Earth” and the rest of the Into Their Labours trilogy. Berger should be mandatory on any food writing class syllabus. When he has a peasant milk a cow, or a villager drink a cup of wine; when a young shepherd holds a fistful of berries, or an old woman boils the soup, you not only get the soup, the wine, the berries and the milk — vividly, tangibly — but in the warm, fullness of the udder, in the blood-colored juice of the berries, in the rough sting of the wine, the weak steam of the soup, you get the poverty; the age; the geography; the politics and the humor; the culture and customs; the mores and ways of the collective village, the individual people and even the damned mountain!"

Berger's stories in this volume are thick and rich, like Wendell Berry's short stories. Perhaps the metaphor is stolen from Berger himself: he presents a ham stock soup too well. I adored the Historical Afterword; I appreciated the poems and line drawings somewhat less, although the departure from standard short story collection format was welcome. The Berry comparison struck me throughout several of the stories, particularly "The Value of Money," which is reminiscent ideologically of several of Berry's essays in "The Way of Ignorance," in which the role that technology plays in the physical, spiritual, and economic life of agricultural communities is seen through the emotion of those who have to live with it. The last and longest piece in Berger's book, "The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol," brought together the staring honesty of Anderson's grotesques in "Winesburg" and a winding sort of spiritual experience built on base experience that captures the mystery of place in a way that straightforward tellings of any tale, true or fiction, cannot even aspire to. ( )

Here is what Berger writes about, with overwhelming beauty and compassion: Lives of hard labor, lived with the passing of the seasons. The closeness of mortality. The way farm animals co-existed with their owners in harsh times and were so well known to their owners. The way these animals were slaughtered when the time came. The preoccupations of hard physical labor, work that never ends and that has no week-end or leisure time of any kind. The need to be working literally all the time. The brutality of living solely with the labor of one's hands and one's back. The ease with which an accident can happen when you life is one of hard labor: an accident that changes lives, or ends them. The way a human mind can see beauty in small ordinary things. The realization, as I read, that the lives of my great-grandparents were much like the hard-labor, desperate, and yet entirely meaningful lives of the people described here by Berger. ( )

Hey, I've got an idea! Why don't I write a trilogy of books about the French peasantry in the post-war period. And I'll combine vignettes, novellae, poems and short stories. And I'll do it all using the tricks of modernist literary prose. Oh, and I'll add an indignant, didactic essay at the start. Sounds... well, it sounds like a godawful idea, but somehow Berger makes it work, and work pretty well. He writes beautifully; he doesn't romanticize the way of life he's trying to describe, but nor does he vilify it; he mixes in humor pretty well; his characters aren't unduly literary. On the down-side, the dialogue is super-stilted. It actually reads like French dialogue translated into English, which is charmless but also, in a weird way, makes it feel more authentic: these are real French peasants who've been translated into English! Anyway, I read this after reading somewhere that it's comparable to McCarthy's Border Trilogy. The first book of this one's better than the first book of that one in a few ways, less impressive in a few others. But I certainly want to read the next two. A solid 3.5 stars, but I'm trying to be sparing with my stars. ( )