Pig Earth(Into Their Labours #1)
by John Berger
Set in a small village in the French Alps, Pig Earth relates the stories of sceptical, hard-working men and fiercely independent women. This book is an act of reckoning that conveys the precise wealth and weight of a world we are losing.
Paperback, 208 pages
Published February 11th 1999 by Bloomsbury Publishing PLC (first published 1979)
Pig Earth consists of naturalistic short stories and surrealistic verses…
“The mother puts
the newborn day
to her breast
turnips
like skulls
are heaped
house high
before the blood has been washed
from the legs of the sky”
“The mother puts
the newborn day
to her breast
turnips
like skulls
are heaped
house high
before the blood has been washed
from the legs of the sky”
Peasant labour is the most ancient in the world and the hardest… Peasants are isolated from the rest of society so they live by their own special cunning and they possess their own specific wisdom like this homegrown witticism: “The weather and the cunt do what they want.”
And they live in their own world.
“At home, in the village, it is you who do everything, and the way you do it gives you a certain authority. There are accidents and many things are beyond your control, but it is you who have to deal with the consequences even of these. When you arrive in the city, where so much is happening and so much is being done and shifted, you realise with astonishment that nothing is in your control. It is like being a bee against a window pane. You see the events, the colours, the lights, yet something, which you can’t see, separates you. With the peasant it is the forced suspension of his habit of handling and doing.”
The stories may seem to be down to earth, literally, but the writing is superb and The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol is a little masterpiece which is bigger than some thick books.
Whatever the motives, political or personal, which have led me to undertake to write something, the writing becomes, as soon as I begin, a struggle to give meaning to experience. Every profession has limits to its competence, but also its own territory. Writing, as I know it, has no territory of its own. The act of writing is nothing except the act of approaching the experience written about... (pp 6)