Recommendations
For the time being, we present our top ten reading list here – rural living environments,
rural regions, told in complex and evocative ways:
Die bemerkenswerte Beständigkeit bäuerlicher Erfahrung und bäuerlicher Weltsicht gewinnt im Moment, da sie von der Auslöschung bedroht ist, eine beispiellose und unerwartete Wichtigkeit.
1. Berger John – Into their Labours (trilogy)
Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2000
From poor rural life in the Savoy – and from the slump in industry and new ways of life. Luminous prose by John Berger.
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2. Bille, S. Corinna – Venusschuh
Zurich: Rotpunktverlag, (1952) / 2015
Maldouraz in the Valais Alps: «A village rose like a plant or a watchful animal in the darkness. Over the church, which shimmered like an asbestos rock, narrow wooden houses crowded in golden darkness. It was the last small human camp on earth, the last sentry, nothing came after that. »
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3. Del Amo, Jean-Baptiste – Animal kingdom
Berlin: Matthes & Seitz Berlin, 2019
A gruesome, bloody panorama, at the center of which is a pig breeding dynasty and its “raw material”, the animals. In this novel, the existential need of humans is just as great as that of the creatures in the pigpens, they are all beasts. And one cannot say, both disgusted and fascinated, what burns more into the memory: the descriptions of the run-down, stubborn yard around 1900 at the beginning of history or the highly industrialized animal factory as an apocalyptic end point of development.
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4. Jacobsen, Roy – The Invisible: An Island Saga
Munich: C.H. Beck, 2019
“Cleaning and patching nets in the freezing cold is the worst job there is. It is the work that has ruined all hands out here on the coast, because only it cannot be carried out with mittens (…) ”is the title of this island saga about work, war, love and the forces of nature. One of the most impressive places is the description of survival in winter, when the frost has a firm grip on the islands, the winter storms are hurricane-like, so strong that it is impossible to bring water to the stables “without arriving there with empty buckets” When the sheep are surrounded by an ice sheet and when the fishing trips are “a game of dice with death”, “over two hundred men perish each winter”.
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5. Kinsky, Esther – Banatsko
Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2011
A linguistically extraordinarily finely chiseled book that reproduces the sadness of the Banat plain and its inhabitants so precisely that this atmosphere can be felt almost physically.
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6. Tocarczuk, Olga – Ur and other times
Zurich: Kampa Verlag (2000) 2019
A village story by the Nobel laureate. In the fictional town of Ur in eastern Poland, fairy tales, myths, contemporary history mix – but the rhythm is determined by the cycle of the seasons, the rural calendar year, becoming and passing in a microcosm.
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7. Pennacchi, Antonio – Canale Mussolini
Munich: Hanser 2010
Authentic insights: “Of course there is no Perruzzi family in Agro Pontino to whom the things told here have happened. (…). However, in Agro Pontino there is no peasant family from Veneto, Friuli or Ferrara – and that is a fact – that would not have happened to at least some of the things that happen to the Peruzzis here.
In this, and only in this sense, the facts told here are to be considered strictly true. ”
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8. Porter, Max – Lanny
German first edition. Zurich, Berlin: Kein & Aber, 2019
An unusual village novel, told in several voices. The story of a little boy in a remote English village. In alternation of many voices there is also the voice or better: the stream of consciousness of a mystical entity can be heard – “old father scale root”, the half spirit, half plant or creature, sometimes underground, then again on the ground or in the air part of the village cosmos is. Or is he the omnipresent natural god Pan? An at least unusual, poetic idea to give the “essence of rurality” a voice.
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9. Seethaler Robert, A Whole Life
Munich: Hanser, 2014
Even the beginning of the novel is masterful: “On a February morning in the year 193, Andreas Egger lifted the dying goatherd Johannes Kalischka, who was only called by the Horners from the valley, from his heavily moist and somewhat sour-smelling straw bag to cover him over the three kilometers long and to carry the mountain path buried under a thick blanket of snow into the village. ”
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10. Silone, Ignazio – Fontamara
Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch (1933) 2018
Archaic world in Abruzzo, the 1920s are written as follows: “In Fontamara, misery was as ancient and natural as rain, wind and snow. The lives of people, animals and the earth seemed to be locked in an unchangeable circle like in a prison … One year was like the other, one generation like the other. No one could imagine that this old way of life would ever change.”
