Pig Earth
“Later, when I was in the Argentine, I used to tell myself that I could not die until I had seen another month of May, here in the mountains. The grass grows knee-high in the meadows and down the centre of the roads between the wheel ruts. If you are with a friend, you walk down the road with the grass between you. In the forest the late beech leaves come out, the greenest leaves in the world. ” ― John Berger, Pig Earth
Pig Earth, the first of three volumes about the movement from rural to urban life, includes poems and short stories about rural life. Berger adds a historical afterword and interprets these stories as parables. Although the book falls into the novel category, I would consider it more appropriately described as existing in the space between memory and arrangement, or between memoir and imagination. In addition to writing about his personal experiences, Berger also acts as a watcher, an eavesdropper, and a covert sharer in the stories. Berger lives in the isolated Jura.
Berger tackles subjects like the lives of hard labor, the proximity of death, and the bond between farm animals and their owners in her kind and exquisite writing. The book is worth studying as people try to understand a world in transition
No comments:
Post a Comment