Ennemonde

After reading several novels that death with death, this was a welcome relief. The author has the sense of a poet and an artist and paints a vivid picture of life for the family in the countryside. This was a dessert compared to the nitty gritty of so many contemporary novels. Clear vision in his writing is worth the read.

Reading this novel feels like you've just bought a ticket for a ride at an amusement park, when you're not quite sure if you want to go on this ride at all, but you get on anyway, because your friend says it's going to be so much fun, and at some point during the ride you know your friend was sorely mistaken, because you're well on your way to a vertiginous and unpleasant and embarrassing outcome if the ride doesn't end soon, but then the ride does end. and you think: wow, that was incredible, and get back in line for another turn.

My father and I are huge Peter Mayle fans, and we travelled through Provence using his books practically as a guide. I picked up this book, set in the same region, to get a perspective from a Provencal writer about life in that golden sunlight. This couldn't be more different from Peter Mayle's accounts in the Provencal sun, peopled by quirky locals.
Giono's Provence is a difficult place to live in, with people's lives, and fortunes, driven entirely by weather conditions, where making it through the years is a struggle. Rivalries are never forgotten, and are passed on from one generation to another. In one particularly powerful paragraph, Giono writes that Sartre had no place here, only the language of the gun. Getting by is so hard, that it leaves no space in the human heart for kindness, or empathy, or even morality. There's some lyrical writing about the landscape, both its harshness and its beauty, but in Giono's Provence, a sunny day doesn't inspire you to paint, it inspires you to hunt.
I'm really glad I read this book, it's short, but thought-provoking. If I had known, however, that the quaint picturesque little towns of Uzes and Sault held such dark passions, I might have thought twice about visiting!!