Synopsis "Hill (New York Review Books Classics)"
Deep in Provence, a century ago, four stone houses perch on a hillside. Wildness presses in from all sides. Beyond a patchwork of fields, a mass of green threatens to overwhelm the village. The animal worlda miming cat, a malevolent boardisplays a mind of its own. The four houses have a dozen residentsand then there is Gagou, a mute drifter. Janet, the eldest of the men, is bedridden; he feels snakes writhing in his fingers and speaks in tongues. Even so, all is well until the village fountain suddenly stops running. From this point on, humans and the natural world are locked in a life-and-death struggle. All the elementsfire, water, earth, and aircome into play. From an early age, Jean Giono roamed the hills of his native Provence. He absorbed oral traditions and, at the same time, devoured the Greek and Roman classics. Gionos startlingly original fusion of idiomatic storytelling and Homeric and Virgilian myth took Paris and New York by storm in 1929. Hill, his first novel and the first winner of the Prix Brentano, comes fully back to life in Paul Epriles poetic translation.
