Starred review from May 27, 2024
Nature’s terrifying power is on display in a new translation of this breathtaking 1926 novel from Swiss writer Ramuz (1878–1947). The people of an impoverished mountain village decide, after fierce debate, to make up for their dwindling resources by using a high-up pasture where, according to lore, a group of their townsfolk met a terrible fate 20 years earlier. Six men and a 13-year-old boy ascend to the pasture with provisions and 70 cows. Their plan: to last the summer in that remote place, tending to the animals that sustain life in the village. Once they reach the pasture, a member of the party who survived the earlier expedition tells the others of the horrors he saw back then, among them a man who turned “all black and swollen” and died after a splinter got stuck in his thumb. The cowherds soon face horrors of their own, as sickness decimates the cattle and one of the men shoots his hand off in a strange accident. Lush prose (snowy mountain peaks seem “made of metal, of gold, steel, of silver; making all around you a sort of jeweled crown”), and profound insights about the insignificance of human life and the force of superstition pave the way to an earth-shattering finale. This thrilling tale has a timeless potency.
June 1, 2024
A malevolent mountain terrorizes the village folk who live below. In what might be rural Switzerland, residents of a hamlet face a quandary. Their animals have little good to feed on but the lush grass growing in Sasseneire, the pasture high on the local mountain at 7,500 feet. Two decades earlier, the mountain had given the townsfolk such a fright that they have avoided it ever since. But such a pity: "all that grass up there going to waste." Dare they try again? "Don't you know, they have the sickness up there!" "No one actually believes any more in those stories, except a handful of old men." After contentious debate, they vote yes. Young Joseph joins a work crew so he can earn enough money to marry Victorine, who waits anxiously at home. Workers bring their animals up the mountain and hear mysterious noises at night, portending evil. They sense an undefined Him, aka the Other, or the Evil One. Indeed, something up there hates them, and that's the nut of this spooky tale. There are lovely descriptions decorated by similes galore, such as "the air moved like when a bed sheet is shaken by its four corners." Taken individually, most comparisons work well. Taken as a whole, they are like the effort of a writer who is trying too hard. Many passages enhance the mood: "The shadows had retreated into the objects that had brought them forth." But there is a darker portent than the shadows. A worker gets a splinter in his thumb, and his body becomes "black and swollen....He rotted before he died." There's a puzzling episode in which another worker, Romain, uses his ramrod-loaded rifle to shoot at and miss a jay, blowing away his hand instead: "tatters of skin...were all that was left of the fingers of his left hand." You don't have to be a gun enthusiast to know how improbable that is. And some readers might find annoying the apparently random switches from past tense to present. One example of many: "He gets up. He was ashamed for himself." Yet there are great lines as well, such as "misfortunes marry one another, they make children." That's surely true on this mountain. Flawed horror, but suitably creepy.
COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.