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Translated from the French by Alan Brown
Two Riders of the Storm is set in the remote High
Hill country of Provence where the lives of the inhabitants
are moulded along fiercley passionate lines.
Two brothers, Marceau and Ange Jason are members of a family
renowned and respected for its brutality and bound together
with ties stronger than those of ordinary brotherly love.
They spend their lives drinking, wresting, selling mules and
driving the local women to force fodder from the harsh soil.
But the equilibrium of their affection is unbalanced after
Marceau brutally kills a rampaging wild horse at a country
fair with a single blow and then defeats two renowned Provençal
wrestling champions to become the local champion. While the
younger sibling’s jealously boils at his brother’s
exploits and growing fame, his own lust for power is steadily
developing. The bond must snap and the end, when it comes,
is a violent — and deadly — confrontation.
Two Riders of the Storm is a story of a Cain-and-Abel-like
struggle for supremacy in its most primitive form described
with an intense and stark poetic beauty that transforms the
brutal imagery into elemental forces of life death.
‘Giono gives us a world he lives in, a world of dream,
passion and reality.’ — Henry Miller
‘It has a timeless fairytale quality . . . The writing
is zestful and broadly humorous, the philosophy that of a
French D.H. Lawrence.’ — Sunday Times
‘A violent but beautiful story of the love between two
brothers . . . Jean Giono recalls D.H. Lawrence, but he accepts
violence and eroticism far more naturally than Lawrence, and
the explosive gusto of his language marks him as a novelist
of great originality.’ — Spectator
‘We are in the reassuring hands of one of the European
masters . . . the kind of descriptive writing that has almost
died out . . . Dense as clotting blood, it is a hot breath
from an older world.’ — Punch
JEAN GIONO (1895—1971) was born in the small Provençal
town of Manosque where he also lived and died. Giono’s
fictional Provence is an almost mythological place of harsh
beauty and unforgiving people, a world away from the pastis,
plane trees and boules evoked by his great friend Marcel Pagnol.
Giono wrote more than thirty novels as well as many volumes
of short stories, plays, poetry, essays as well as film scripts.
Imprisoned at the beginning of WWII for his pacifist views,
he was wrongly imprisoned again for collaboration at the war’s
end. He is now firmly established amongst the most distinguished
of French writers. |
