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Through the door of a Swiss inn the reader steps into a painting. Two men talk to each other and before long the writer -someone like them, one of them- begins to address us. Thus commences the fugue that is Beauty on Earth,in which the coming of a beautiful orphan to her uncle's inn brings a gradual chaos upon his town. Swiss novelist Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz published La Beauté in 1927. This translation by Michelle Bailat-Jones is a gift for which English language readers have waited decades.
A mountain falls down and an alpine village is frozen in its summer state. When a ghostly figure appears the villagers are terrorised. Is it a soul trapped in limbo, come to make his baleful complaint? Swiss writer Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz sets his masterful tale of love and loss against the tectonic indifference of the high Alps.
Young villagers challenge fate by grazing their cattle on a mountain pasture despite a curse that hangs over it; and the reader shares their panic and final despair.
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Jean-Luc Persecuted follows the ill-fated life of an unhappily married man. When Jean-Luc’s wife pursues an affair and leaves him with their child, Jean-Luc’s behavior becomes more and more erratic. He falls to drinking, behaving recklessly, and squandering his money. The narrative follows the explosive downfall of a lone man and his unstoppable mental collapse, surrounded by villagers unable to effect real change. This novel, never before translated, exemplifies the earthy, realistic, often allegorical style of iconic Swiss writer Ramuz.
Young villagers challenge fate by grazing their cattle on a mountain pasture despite a curse that hangs over it; and the reader shares their panic and final despair.
The old man Sage taught Maurice Farinet many things and one of them was the location of a secret vein of gold. After Sage died, Farinet began to make coins. Based on a true story, Ramuz tells an extraordinary tale of mountains and villages, of independence and the price of freedom.
What might the end of the world look like, to people who inhabit high mountains, whose lives are governed by the dependable revolution of the seasons? Perhaps the sun might slip beneath a western ridge one evening, and not return in the morning. In the first half of the 20th century, that terrifying prospect represented a mild version of hell. Real hell would be knowing in advance that it was going to happen. And so, revisiting a theme that Charles Ferdinand Ramuz had explored many times before in his fiction-notably in a short story that he wrote in 1912, on the eve of another war-he bestowed upon the villagers of Upper Saint-Martin the dreadful knowledge that the sun was sick and would soo...
The "world of letters" has always seemed a matter more of metaphor than of global reality. In this book, Pascale Casanova shows us the state of world literature behind the stylistic refinements--a world of letters relatively independent from economic and political realms, and in which language systems, aesthetic orders, and genres struggle for dominance. Rejecting facile talk of globalization, with its suggestion of a happy literary "melting pot," Casanova exposes an emerging regime of inequality in the world of letters, where minor languages and literatures are subject to the invisible but implacable violence of their dominant counterparts. Inspired by the writings of Fernand Braudel and Pi...