Once in Europa

by John Berger

Overview

From Booker Prize-winning author John Berger, a luminous collection of interwoven stories, Once in Europa is a portrait of two worlds—a small Alpine village bound to the earth and by tradition, and the restless, future-driven culture that will invade it—at their moment of collision. The instrument of entrapment is love: the passion of a willful shepherd for a shrewd bourgeois housewife; of a vital young woman for a dashing Russian who has come to work in the local factory; of a steadfast son for his aged mother. Lives are lost and hearts are broken, and, always, love is a transcending form of grace. In Once in Europa, it speaks as plainly and as movingly as a remembered language, creating a work of astonishing tenderness.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780679737162
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	10/27/1992
Series:	Into Their Labours Series , #2
Pages:	176
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

John Berger was born in London in 1926. He is well known for his novels and stories as well as for his works of nonfiction, including several volumes of art criticism. His first novel, A Painter of Our Time, was published in 1958, and since then his books have included Ways of Seeing, the fiction trilogy Into Their Labours, and the novel G., which won the Booker Prize in 1972. In 1962 he left Britain permanently, and lived in a small village in the French Alps. He died in 2017.

What People are Saying About This

Angela Carter

Marvelous story.

Editorial Reviews

The second volume of the trilogy ``Into Their Labours'' is, like the first ( Pig Earth , LJ 9/15/80), a collection of stories set in the French Alps. Although ostensibly about love, they give us a vivid picture of a changing world in which the traditional way of life is rapidly disappearing as the peasants move to the cities to find work or are employed in the tourist industry and new factories. The title story is a particularly poignant indictment of such changes. In it a woman named Odile tells us how a factory scars her valley, destroying her family's farm, and then scars her life as her lover is killed and later her husband disabled in industrial accidents. Yet these stories are not morbid, instead containing a cautionary note about how difficult it is to regain an idyllic state once it is lost. This sensitively written collection is recommended for most libraries. Christine King, SUNY at Stony Brook Lib.

Library Journal