Book Review

Joy of Man's Desiring
by Jean Giono

R.D. Kushner

 

The world is alive. It is full of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and textures; in short, living is a sensual experience, from which it is possible to derive immense joy, and exercise great desire. In this magical novel, Jean Giono conjures the pastoral community of Gremone Plateau, and the sensory rich landscape in which it exists. Through Giono's prose, the reader is immediately aware that this landscape is more alive than any they have ever experienced; and their increased awareness is paralleled by a heightened awareness of Giono's characters, as their lives are transformed, along with the reader's. Giono commands the whole world, both in his story and in the reader's own life, to come alive - and it becomes magical.

The cadence of life in the small farming community on Gremone Plateau is changed when a strange man wanders into town. The narrator introduces us to Bobi, on the ninth page of this amazing story; but within those few pages prior, the reader is already aware that the beauty of the world lies waiting for discovery. On the very first page, the night sky is rendered this way:

"The sky was vibrating like a sheet of metal. You could not tell what made it do so because all was still, even the tiniest willow twig. It was not the wind. It was simply that the sky came down and touched the earth, raked the plains, struck the mountains, and made the corridors of the forest ring. Then it rose once more to the far heights (1)."

Jordan, a middle aged man, has woken up in the middle of the night. He leaves his wife in bed, and witnesses the sky, as the narrator describes it. He decides that he will go out to plow his fields under that sky, even though it is still the middle of the night. Along with the immediacy of that urge, the reader is told that Jordan has sensed for a long time that someone would arrive on Gremone Plateau:

"For a long time he had been expecting the appearance of a man. Who, he did not know. He did not know whence he would come. He did not know whether he would come. He only desired it. That is how things happen sometimes, and human hope is such a miracle that it is not surprising if at times it glows within one for no earthly reason. The main thing is that afterwards it continues to lift one's life on it's great velvet wings (3)."

The visitor is Bobi. Through Bobi, the narrator unfolds a story of the mystery of the Earth, and the beauty of desire and the pursuance of joy. In Bobi's first meeting with Jordan, there is an exchange that becomes a pattern which will resonate through the rest of the story; and a pattern that will resonate through the reader's life long after the book is placed back upon the shelf. The conversation is about the night sky, and about the stars; a sky which the narrator already introduced on the first page - a night sky which was described in such a way that the reader cannot claim to have ever witnessed a night sky before:

"What do you think of this night?"
"I have never seen the like of it."
"Nor have I," said the man. "Orion looks like Queen Anne's lace. (12)"

And thus the tale begins. Through that metaphor, and many more to follow, the narrator makes the world come alive. Giono continues, throughout the novel, to describe wonders of the world as simultaneously obvious and foreign. Later in the story, Bobi reminds Jordan, of their earlier conversation, and makes explicit [for the characters in the story and also for the reader], his reason for describing the night sky as a flower:

"Do you remember," said Bobi, "the vast night? It closed the earth in on all horizons."
"I remember."
"Then I said to you: 'Look up there, Orion-Queen Anne's lace, a little bunch of stars."
Jordan did not reply. He looked at Jacquou and at Randoulet and at Carle. They were listening.
"And if I had said to you: 'Orion,' all alone," said Bobi, "you would have seen the stars, nothing more, and that would not have been the first time you had seen them..."
"And if I had said: 'Queen Anne's lace,' all alone, you would only have seen the flower as you have already seen it a thousand times with no effect. But I said to you 'Orion-Queen Anne's lace,' and at first you said: 'I beg your pardon?' to make me repeat it, and I did repeat it. Then you saw the Queen Anne's lace in the sky and the sky was all abloom (183).

But it is not enough just for the world to come alive, and for people to see and appreciate the extraordinary beauty it has to offer. The Joy of Man's Desiring quietly probes deeper into the nature of life, and begins to question the societal constructs under which people live their lives.

Through this simple story, the narrator posits that there is nothing more important in life than the pursuit of joy. The reader will immediately grasp this concept, for by the time the narrator states it explicitly, the reader has already bathed in a new world of sights, and sounds, and smells, and tastes, and textures; a story-world in which Giono teases the fantastic from the benign. A story-world so magnificent that it has the power to render the 21st Century so brilliantly that it will gleam anew and sparkle as if the reader has never before opened their eyes.