BOOKS

Landau, Saul

BOOKS Once Upon a Time ONCE IN EUROPA by John Berger Pantheon. 191 pp. $14.95 hardcover. $7.95 paperback. by Saul Landau The European peasantry is being exterminated. Its villages have been...

...Time, space, and the nature of the cognitive process are the underlying themes of Once in Europa...
...Each story, through symbols as well as plot, portrays a sense of personal and social loss...
...5.00...
...Odile leaves her home to mate with a foreign miner, who impregnates her and then dies in an accident...
...Instead, the woman opts for a young woodcutter who will integrate her into the modern world of the small town petit bourgeoisie...
...88 pp...
...The first sounds I remember," says the character Odile, "are the factory sirens and the noise of the river...
...The cruelty of nature in its raw peasant form is no match for the sly and devastating penetration by the slick new world...
...The loss of texture in her life combines with her now-skewed sense of time, removed from seasons and cycles of the moon...
...With her preppy husband she finds a house in the village and schemes to use Boris's infatuation to take his wealth from him...
...Time is not money, but a measure of relationship, connection with space through knowledge that is both inherited as an animal would receive it and ingrained in the organic connections between the needs of body and spirit and the harsh material world...
...At stake in these deceptively simple tales are a civilization and ethos, whose pillars are eroding under the tidal wave of progress...
...Odile's father holds out against the encroachment of the corporation, but his children no longer have that stubborn determination born of struggle with nature...
...She brings a sexual excitement into the brute Boris's life, one that he cannot resist, yet one so superficial that he cannot believe it...
...To help us the reader understand this loss, Berger tries to make the reader smell and feel nature, see and hear it, in all of its beauty and brutality...
...Berger paints the characters and landscapes like a Goya with words, conjuring up horrifying yet real images of devastating change...
...The magic of nature has become mixed with the newer mystery, and "anyone who believes that evil does not exist and that the world was made good should go out tonight into the fields...
...In Tunnel Vision, Daniel Cantor and Juliet Schor examine one important aspect of that story—how the top leadership of organized labor signed on as collaborators in the Cold War and became willing handmaidens of what the authors call Wall Street Internationalism...
...She finds herself managing a small shop in a village and selling souvenirs to tourists, an evolutionary step from the time she worked with her hands and used the material of nature to make her food and clothes and treat the wounds of the old shepherd...
...In "The Time of the Cosmonauts," an old peasant and a young woman find themselves the sole inhabitants of a once-populated mountain peak, where they graze their animals...
...In his first, Pig Earth, we sank into the folkways and magic of village life just before the total disruption of tradition began...
...The world of the accumulation of consumer goods competes successfully with the old one in which accumulation of livestock had meaning...
...The shepherdess rejects the old peasant's nonverbal yet poetic plea to breed with him so as to keep alive another generation of these special people who provided Europe with its food for centuries...
...Soon after, Boris lies dead, killed by a sophisticated psyche that devoured him...
...So great is the cognitive barrier between the peasant strong man and the city woman, between the ingrained dirt in his hands and her coquettish manner, that he cannot comprehend another human being using him as a love partner only in order to take his house from him...
...The peasant youth have begun to leave the dying villages, to marry outside the peasantry to workers who still somehow hold the promise of preserving the sense of dignity and human bonding that the peasant strongholds have lost...
...Television changes the way evenings are spent...
...They share a sense of values and, like the Incas running from the con-quistadores, they have escaped from the encroaching world of machines...
...Its villages have been invaded by the first generation of gen-trifying yuppies, modern manufacturers dropping toxic waste on the pasture lands, great timber companies leveling the Alpine forests...
...We, the readers, might suffer vicariously but we ought to reflect as well, for it is our own human potential that Berger's peasant characters embody, and we must ask ourselves whether, along with these apparently remote peasants, it is not the nobler parts of our own natures that have been consumed by the unquestioned thrust of science and progress...
...The peasantry merge with the workers and the lower middle classes as they lose their will along with their life style...
...Their brief, lively text provides a scathing indictment of the labor bureaucracy, but it concludes on a hopeful and helpful note—an outline of a proposed new foreign policy for labor that would rein-stitute the principle of solidarity with all workers at home and abroad...
...He places the reader inside the rustic houses and barns, in pasture and potato land with Saul Landau is a senior fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C...
...In Once in Europa, the characters make us cry as they suffer from the heartbreak of disillusion, the breaking of their knowledge bonds and emotional integrity...
...His passion for the blonde and his link to land and animals were an organic whole, and thus the strongest of men became vulnerable to the frailest—in body and mind—of women...
...M BOOKS BRIEFLY Solidarity TUNNEL VISION: Labor, the World Economy, and Central America by Daniel Cantor and Juliet Schor South End Press, 116 St...
...Boris faces the wrath of nature as one bolt of lightning fries his herd of sheep...
...The dismal decline of the American labor movement—in numbers and clout, in commitment to organizing the unorganized, in dedication to traditional union values—is a fit subject of study by those who seek to revive a dynamic movement for social, political, and economic justice in America...
...Berger's beautiful and painful stories contain neither heroes nor villains...
...Odile mates again, this time with a former miner who has lost his legs in an industrial mishap...
...What changes occur in the very nature of human emotions when the material and moral centers of a thousand-year-old way of life are destroyed...
...Under such an onslaught, what happens to love between men and women, to the structure and bonding of families inside the besieged villages...
...His book, "The Dangerous Doctrine: National Security and U.S...
...The mine wall caves in on him, the result of imperfect technology...
...Into the village comes the manganese mine, and automobiles race through the narrow streets built centuries before...
...In these Alpine village tales, the rites of the seasons, once appropriately celebrated, are erased by the ceaseless drone of farm mechanization...
...the shepherds and planters, providing a visceral comprehension of old ways of tilling, weaving, milking, which he puts alongside the milking machines and other oil-powered technologies that have invaded the quiet of the forests and the grazing land...
...Schor, an assistant professor of economics at Harvard University, has written widely about political economy...
...Cantor (a former editorial intern at The Progressive) has been an organizer since 1977 and works for the National Labor Committee in Support of Democracy and Human Rights in El Salvador...
...On each page of these stories, the snowcapped plateau and the elements of the natural world fight for their existence with the onrush of technology...
...The time in these stories is thirty years ago, when the changes were first showing in village life...
...Her conquest of Boris's heart and subsequently his wealth is the moral of all the stories in Once in Europa...
...Once in Europa, by John Berger, is a linked series of short stories set against the backdrop of industrialization of the village, deforestation of the countryside, intercontinental jets and sputniks flying over the heads of grazing sheep and cows, and incursions by urbanites into ancient peasant villages...
...She is more than a city woman, she is the new way of life...
...The black hat is the technological world's inexorable invasion of the village and its imposition of values that correspond to a new reality, one that threatens to obliterate the last traces of organic life...
...It is the second part of John Berger's trilogy about peasant life...
...Botolph Street, Boston, MA 02115...
...Foreign Policy," was recently published by Westview Press...
...As a crippled shopkeeper he still manages to retain connections with a nonscientific past...
...A city blonde appears before the peasant Boris as an irresistible lure...

Vol. 52 • June 1988 • No. 6


 
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