The Song Of The World

Description

Of Sailor's twin sons, the elder is dead and the younger is missing.A simple woodsman, Sailor resolves to find the boy, fearing the worst.Soon after he and his friend Antonio set off, they stumble across a blind girl giving birth. This strange circumstance proves typical of their journey into the heart of the forest. Sailor and Antonio discover that, though the lost Twin is alive, he is the target of a manhunt. As Sailor and Antonio attempt to rescue Twin, the adventures unravel at a breathtaking speed. The net tightens around the three men until one of them is trapped and killed. And only then does the real action of this remarkable picaresque novel begin. In Giono's universe, no murder shall go unavenged. This tale of primitive love and vendetta is cast in a timeless landscape of river, mountain and forest. With its taut, fast-paced story and pastoral setting, The Song of the World is another triumph from the celebrated author of The Man Who Planted Trees.

Jean Giono (1895-1970) was born in Manosque, Provence, the son of an Italian cobbler, and lived there most of his life. He supported his family working as a bank clerk for eighteen years (with an interval serving in the ranks in the First World War) before his first two novels were published, thanks to the generosity of Andre Gide to critical acclaim. He went on to write thirty novels and numerous essays and stories, as well as poetry and plays. In 1953 he was awarded the Prix Monegasque for his collective work. The same year, he made a prescient contribution to the "ecological" movement with his novella The Man who Planted Trees. This, and his novel The Horseman on the Roof, which was made into a highly acclaimed film starring Olivier Martinez and Juliette Binoche, are among this author's titles also published by Harvill. Jean Giono married in 1920 and had two daughters.

Giono gives us the world we live in, a world of dream, passion and reality -- Henry Miller There is still dew on this world of Giono's; he looks out on it and records his impressions of it almost as if he were the first man seeing it. The emotions of his people are refreshingly forthright and uncomplicated, and in his pages man stands in his natural relation to the animate and inanimate world about him * New York Times * Jean Giono is one of the giants of modern French letters. He is the poet of the French countryside and of the French peasant, of man and nature, and the relation of man to nature. His books stand apart; there is nothing else in all French literature quite like them * Living Age * As with Faulkner, we have blood, night, violence, myth. To read Giono is to be immersed -- Francois Nourissier