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Odile lives with her ageing father as he fights to retain his smallholding amidst the encroachment of the local steel works. She recounts that "the first sounds I remember are the factory siren and the noise of the river", and her idyllic childhood is increasingly eroded and replaced by the environmental destruction which the factory visits upon both its surroundings and those who work there: "the furnaces throbbed, the river flowed, the smoke, sometimes white, sometimes grey, sometimes yellow, thrust upwards into the sky, men worked night and day for generations, sweating, retching, pissing, coughing". Odile's promising school career is cut short as she falls in love with the communist steelworker Stepan. His sudden death at the factory, and the company's indifference to the pregnant Odile leave her destitute, ultimately finding solace in another victim of the factory's malign practices, the crippled Michel.
The tragic impact of industrialisation upon a rural community is wonderfully judged by Berger, and there are passages of exquisite lyricism and stoicism as Odile attempts to eke out an existence for herself and her children. Macdonald's photographs beautifully complement the tone and atmosphere of Berger's text, especially her astonishing aerial photographs of urban and rural wildernesses. This is a sober snapshot of late 20th-century Europa. --Jerry Brotton --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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It is important to realize that Berger is describing the tail of a process with roots in the Renaissance and that accelerated tremendously in the 19th century. The traditional life described in Pig Earth is actually a life that has been greatly affected by industrial civilization. Many men in the community described by Berger participate in seasonal labor in large cities, there is compulsory primary education, and the local church has a strong influence. Other aspects of the modern world intrude themselves. These include military service, railroads and it is likely that farm products are produced for an international market. In the early or even mid-19th century, a community like this would have been completely geographically isolated, illiterate, and probably would speak a language distinct from French. There are some other fine books devoted to this topic. Eugen Weber's excellent Peasants into Frenchman is a very interesting and readable social history of the impact of the modern world on the French peasantry. A detailed view of French peasant life can be found in Pierre Helias The Horse of Pride, a combined ethnography and memoir about a Breton peasant community written by a scholar who was the son of Breton peasants.
Until the advent of large mechanized urban centers and the factories that required masses of people, the Alpine Culture was safe if for no other reason than the alternatives were virtually nonexistent. Human nature not only gravitates to those opportunities that offer a seemingly better life, it also tends to be blind to the negatives that are a part of this perceived improvement. At the outset of the new choices the ignorance of the first to leave is understandable, benefits are advertised, the dangers the changes also hold are not spoken of. So the youth, the future of any Society leave for promises of a very short workweek compared to the round the clock life that a farm requires. Youth too is drawn to all the supposed wonders of the Metropolis with visions more grand than the reality.
And the end begins, women looking for a better future marry outside the village, men too find spouses from the cities. Those that are left behind are the most determined to maintain their way of life, or they are the damaged ones as judged by society, women who are widowed with children, men who have been horribly maimed in the factories. Mr. Berger also records a story where the invasion of change takes a physical presence with a factory all but engulfing a man who refuses to part with the family farm despite the ever-increasing money the company offers for his land. This happens even as the whole area is poisoned by the pollution the factory emits, and the social destruction that arrives in the form of imported prostitutes for the workers who now live in communal barracks as opposed to their homes.
By the end of this second work it is hard to imagine what further fall awaits what has already happened to those who once lived a difficult but not necessarily more troublesome life. This book is sad and depressing. The final chapter will be pure tragedy.
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