JEAN GRAINGER

USA TODAY BESTSELLING AUTHOR

SELECTED BY BOOKBUB READERS IN TOP 19 OF HISTORICAL FICTION BOOKS.

WINNER OF THE 2016 AUTHOR'S CIRCLE HISTORICAL NOVEL OF EXCELLENCE

'Warm and wise, reading a Jean Grainger novel is like sitting in the kitchen of a friend. Her authentic writing welcomes you into the heart of Ireland.' Kate Kerrigan, NYT Bestselling Author.

'In the same magical tradition as classic Irish storytellers, Maeve Binchy and Frank McCourt, Jean Grainger transports the reader into a world where the characters not only come alive, but become friends, who stay with you long after you've closed the last page. I have no doubt that Jean Grainger will be considered one of the finest historical novelists of our time.' Roberta Kagan, Bestselling author of 'All My Love, Detrick' series.

Hello and thanks for taking time out to check out my page. If you're wondering what you're getting with my books then think of the late great Maeve Binchy but sometimes with a historical twist. I was born in Cork, Ireland in 1971 and I come from a large family of storytellers, so much so that we had to have 'The Talking Spoon', only the person holding the spoon could talk!

I have worked as a history lecturer at University, a teacher of English, History and Drama in secondary school, a playwright, and a tour guide of my beloved Ireland. I am married to the lovely Diarmuid and we have four children. We live in a 200 year old stone cottage in Mid-Cork with my family and the world's smallest dogs, called Scrappy and Scoobi..

My experiences leading groups, mainly from the United States, led me to write my first novel, 'The Tour'. My observances of the often funny, sometimes sad but always interesting events on tours fascinated me. People really did confide the most extraordinary things, the safety of strangers I suppose. It's a fictional story set on a tour bus but many of the characters are based on people I met over the years.

The sequel to The Tour, called Safe at the Edge of the World, follows Conor O'Shea once again as he takes another motley crew on a tour of Ireland. This time with a very odd couple aboard who seem to be hiding something.

The third Tour book in that series is called The Story of Grenville King and in it Conor gets an opportunity to renovate and run an old castle as a five star resort, but something isn't quite right, and the castle has many secrets.

The fourth Conor O'Shea book is called The Homecoming of Bubbles O'Leary and features a group of friends taking their friend Bubbles home to Ireland from New York, on last time. The next book is based on a chance conversation with a friend about the reality of DNA testing and the truths it might revel unwittingly. It's called Finding Billie Romano and the sixth book finds Conor and his pals in dire financial straits and the only life line is a reality TV show in the castle, something Conor hates the idea of but needs must!

My first World War 2 novel, 'So Much Owed' is a family saga based in Ireland following the Buckley family of Dunderrig House. The story opens in the trenches of WW1 at the end of the war and moves to tranquil West Cork. As the next generation of the Buckley family find themselves embroiled once again in war, the action moves from Ireland to wartime Belfast, from occupied France to the inner sanctum of German society in neutral Dublin. The history of the period was my academic specialty so I'm delighted to be able to use it in a work of fiction.

Shadow of a Century, is set in New York in 2015 as well as in Dublin during the events of Easter Week 1916, where Irish men and women fought valiantly to rid our island of British Imperialism. While not my academic specialty, I loved researching this book. My husband, most fortunately for me is an expert on this era and so I didn't have to go too far for assistance. The story features three very strong women, united through a battered old flag. Its essentially a love story, but with a bit of intrigue thrown in for good measure.

Under Heaven's Shining Stars, was published in 2016 and is set in my home city of Cork. This time its against the backdrop of 1950s and 60s Ireland and it really is a book about friendship, family and the Catholic church. I have a deep personal affinity with all of my characters but this book is especially close to my heart.

A book I wrote while travelling with my family for a year in Australia is called Sisters of the Southern Cross and don't forget to read the afterword on that one as to how that story came about, its a tale stranger than fiction in its own right!

I wrote a novel called Letters of Freedom after hearing a woman on the radio one day explaining how being raised in state care prepared a person so poorly for the realities of independent living. Her story was so moving I was inspired to write a short novella there and then.

Carmel's story really seemed to touch people, and I got such a huge reaction from readers all over the world, many of them telling me the most extraordinary stories from their own lives, I wrote a sequel. The Future's Not Ours To See, which follows Carmel as she ventures forth into a world she knows so little of is out now. The third Carmel and Sharif book, What Will be, is also available and it finishes the story of this woman who spent her entire childhood believing something that wasn't true. She returns to Ireland, very reluctantly and discovers that in order to go forward she has to first make peace with her past.

My next series, The Robinswood Story, opens with What Once Was True, and tells the story of a big old house in Co Waterford during WW2. Two families live there, the impoverished Keneficks who own it and the hard-working Murphys who work for them. Life has remained unchanged for centuries but when war comes, it means everything changes and people have to question what once was true. This book was selected by Bookbub readers as in the top 19 Historical Fiction books of 2018. The sequel to this, Return to Robinswood, continues the story and the final instalment, Trials and Tribulations takes it to it's conclusion.

The Star and the Shamrock, the Emerald Horizon, The Hard Way Home and The World Starts Anew is a series of four books about two little German Jewish children who find themselves on the Kindertransport out of Berlin. They end up in Northern Ireland and it was a real labour of love. The research was harrowing at times, but I hope I've done justice to the stories of so many children who escaped the Nazi terror, often never again to see their parents. This is a book of hope in dark times, of the enduring power of love and the incredible resilience of the human spirit.

My current series, The Queenstown Series, centres on twelve year old Harp Devereaux and her mother Rose and the first book opens on the day Titanic sails from Queenstown, Co Cork on her last fateful journey. It is a bestselling series and people really seem to connect to the precocious Harp and her hard-working mother as they battle to survive in a society where conforming and playing by the rules was paramount. It is so far a three book series, The West's Awake, and The Harp and the Rose being the next two books but I'm currently writing book four.

Many of the people who have reviewed my books have said that you get to know the characters and really become attached to them, that's wonderful for me to hear because that's how I feel about them too. I grew up on Maeve Binchy and Deirdre Purcell and I aspired to being like them. If you buy one of my books I'm very grateful and I really hope you enjoy it. If you do, or even if you don't, please take the time to post a review. Writing is a source of constant contentment to me and I am so fortunate to have the time and the inclination to do it, but to read a review written by a reader really does make my day.

French writer

Jean Giono (30 March 1895 – 8 October 1970) was a French author who wrote works of fiction mostly set in the Provence region of France.

First period[edit]

Jean Giono was born to a family of modest means, his father a cobbler of Piedmontese descent^[1] and his mother a laundry woman. He spent the majority of his life in Manosque, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence. Forced by family needs to leave school at the age of sixteen and get a job in a bank, he nevertheless continued to read voraciously, in particular the great classic works of literature including the Bible, Homer's Iliad, the works of Virgil, and the Tragiques of Agrippa d'Aubigné. He continued to work at the bank until he was called up for military service at the outbreak of World War I, and the horrors he experienced on the front lines turned him into an ardent and lifelong pacifist. In 1919, he returned to the bank, and a year later, married a childhood friend with whom he had two children. Following the success of his first published novel, Colline (1929) (which won him the Prix Brentano earned $1,000, and drew an English translation of the book^[2]), he left the bank in 1930 to devote himself to writing on a full-time basis.^[3]

Colline was followed by two more novels heavily influenced by Virgil and Homer, Un de Baumugnes (1929) and Regain (1930), the three together comprising the famous “Pan trilogy”, so-called because in it Giono depicts the natural world as being imbued with the power of the Greek god Pan. The other novels Giono published during the nineteen-thirties on the whole continued in the same vein—set in Provence, with peasants as protagonists, and displaying a pantheistic view of nature.^[4]Marcel Pagnol based three of his films on Giono's work of this period: Regain, starting Fernandel and with music by Honegger; Angèle, and La Femme du boulanger, with the actor Raimu.^[4]

Throughout the nineteen-thirties, Giono expressed the pacifism he had adopted as a result of his experiences during World War I in novels such as Le grand troupeau (1931), and pamphlets such as Refus d’obéissance (1937), and the Lettre aux paysans sur la pauvreté et la paix (1938).^[4] This in turn resulted in his forming a relationship with a group of like-minded people including Lucien Jacques and Henri Fluchère among others, who gathered each year in the hamlet of Contadour, and whose pacifist writings were published as the Cahiers du Contadour.^[5]

In 1937, he famously asked, "What is the worst that can happen if Germany invades France?"^[6]

Transition[edit]

The end of the nineteen-thirties brought a crisis in Giono's life. As far as his writing was concerned, he had come to feel that it was time to stop “doing Giono” (faire du Giono), and to take his work in a new direction.^[7] At the same time it was becoming apparent that his work for pacifism was a failure, and that another war was inevitable and fast approaching. The declaration of war on 1 September 1939 came while the Contadoureans were assembled for their annual reunion. The result of Giono's former peace-making efforts was that he was briefly imprisoned as a Nazi sympathiser before the proceedings were dropped without any charges being laid.^[3]

The subsequent period of renewal saw the self-educated Giono now turn to Stendhal as a literary model in the same way as previously he had been influenced by the Classics. His novels thus began to be set in a specific time and place, confronting the protagonists with specific politics, issues, causes and events, in contrast with the timelessness of his earlier work. He also adopted the Stendhalian narrative technique of letting the reader into the experience of the protagonist by means of the interior monologue, whereas the dominant technique of his earlier novels had been that of the omniscient narrator.^[8]

He similarly formed the ambition of writing a sequence of ten novels inspired by Balzac’s Comédie humaine, in which he would depict characters from all strata of society rather than peasants, and compare and contrast different moments in history by depicting the experiences of members of the same family in times a hundred years apart. This project was never realised, with only the four Hussard novels, (Angelo (1958), Le Hussard sur le Toit (1951), Le Bonheur fou (1957), Mort d’un personnage (1948)) actually completed according to plan, but it is echoed in Giono's postwar work in the dichotomy between historical novels set in the mid-nineteenth century, and contemporary novels set in the mid-twentieth.^[9] His newfound interest in history even led to his writing an actual history book, Le Désastre de Pavie (1963).

As he began to focus on the human being rather than the natural world, his understanding of psychology and motivation was also influenced by the writings of Niccolò Machiavelli, whose analysis helped him to articulate a much darker view of human nature in his later years, and about whom he wrote the article "Monsieur Machiavel, ou le coeur humain dévoilé" (1951).

In 1944, when France was liberated, Giono was again accused of collaboration with the Nazis, and was again imprisoned for five months before he was freed without charges ever being made.^[8] This led to his being blacklisted, so that for three years he was barred from publication. It was during this period of ostracism that he began in 1945 to write Angelo, metaphorically the laboratory in which he experimented, tested and attempted to integrate his new approach to his work. It contains not only a first version of the story of Angélo Pardi that took its final form in Le Hussard sur le toit and Le Bonheur fou, but also the nucleus of many other works of his second period, and makes use of new narrative techniques he developed further in other novels. He ultimately set it aside, no doubt considering it too derivative, and moved on to the other projects it gave rise to.^[4]

Second period[edit]

The first major novel of his second period to be published was Un roi sans divertissement (published in 1947, and made into a successful film for which Giono himself wrote the screenplay, in 1963). It takes the form of a detective story set in Haute Provence in the early nineteenth century, and reveals Giono's new pessimism about human nature in that the policeman is forced to the realisation that he himself is capable of being as evil as the murderer he is tracking. Stylistically brilliant, it consists of the juxtaposed accounts of events as told by the different people affected, devoid of explanation, from which the reader must piece together the meaning.^[4]

The most famous novel of his second period is Le Hussard sur le toit, the first part of the definitive version of the story of Angélo Pardi he had sketched in Angelo. It was published in 1951, and made into a film by Jean-Paul Rappeneau starring Juliette Binoche in 1995. Angélo, like Stendhal's Fabrice del Dongo (La Chartreuse de Parme) on whom he is modeled, is a chivalrous romantic whose quest constitutes an inquiry into the nature of happiness, while the cholera epidemic he finds himself confronted with in Provence in 1832 is an allegory for the wars that had so deeply affected Giono. In structure it is a picaresque series of episodes, full of evocative descriptions of the country. Its sequel, Le Bonheur fou (The Straw Man) (1957) follows Angélo in the Italy of the 1848 revolution.

Les Ames fortes (1950), filmed by Raoul Ruiz in 2001, is another of the masterpieces of this period. As dark as Un Roi sans divertissement, it examines the depths a person can sink to in greed, grasping self-interest and the exploitation of others. Also as in Un Roi sans divertissement, the story is again told purely in the words of the protagonists, without the intervention of a narrator or comment from the author, thus forcing readers to reach their own conclusions. Les Grands chemins (1951), considerably less dark, deals with the nature of the road, gambling, the lie, and friendship, again in a first-person narration entirely in the voice of the protagonist and devoid of explanation or elucidation from the author.^[8]

Also worthy of mention is his Voyage en Italie (1953). Neither a travel guide nor a straightforward account of a trip as the name suggests, this is a highly personal account of Giono's experiences and of the people he meets and sees that tells the reader more about Giono than about Italy.

Outside France, Giono's best-known work is probably the short story The Man who Planted Trees (and 1987 film version). This optimistic tale of a man who brings a deserted valley back to life by planting trees reflects Giono's long-standing love of the natural world, an attitude that made him a precursor to the modern ecological movement. He thus declined to receive any royalties from this text, and granted free use to anyone who wanted to distribute or translate it.^[10]

In his later years, Giono was honoured with the Prince Rainier of Monaco literary prize in 1953, awarded for his lifetime achievements, was elected to the Académie Goncourt in 1954, and became a member of the Conseil Littéraire of Monaco in 1963.^[8]

Giono died of a heart attack in 1970.^[11]

The Collège Jean Giono in Nice is named after him, as are streets in Cannes and Fréjus.

Works[edit]

Main article: Jean Giono bibliography

References[edit]

Further reading[edit]

• "Jean Giono: From Pacifism to Collaboration". TELOS 139 (Summer 2007). New York: Telos Press
• Giono. Pierre Citron, 1990
• Jean Giono et les techniques du roman. Pierre R. Robert, 1961

External links[edit]

American writer

Jean Marie Auel (; née Untinen; born February 18, 1936) is an American writer who wrote the Earth's Children books, a series of novels set in prehistoric Europe that explores human activities during this time, and touches on the interactions of Cro-Magnon people with Neanderthals. Her books have sold more than 45 million copies worldwide.^[2]

Early years[edit]

Auel was born Jean Marie Untinen in 1936 in Chicago.^[3] She is of Finnish descent, the second of five children of Neil Solomon Untinen, a housepainter, and Martha (née Wirtanen) Untinen.

Auel attended University of Portland.^[1] While a student, she joined Mensa^[4] and worked at Tektronix as a clerk (1965–1966), a circuit-board designer (1966–1973), a technical writer (1973–1974), and a credit manager (1974–1976). She earned an MBA from the University of Portland in 1976.^[1] She received honorary degrees from her alma mater, Pacific University, Portland State University, the University of Maine and the Mount Vernon College for Women.^[5]

Career as novelist[edit]

In 1977, Auel began extensive library research of the Ice Age for her first book. She joined a survival class to learn how to construct an ice cave, and learned primitive methods of making fire, tanning leather, and knapping stone from the aboriginal skills expert Jim Riggs.^[6]

The Clan of the Cave Bear was nominated for numerous literary awards, including an American Booksellers Association nomination for best first novel.^[7] It was also later adapted into a screenplay for the film of the same name.

After the sales success of her first book, Auel has been able to travel to the sites of prehistoric ruins and relics, and also to meet many of the experts with whom she had been corresponding. Her research has taken her across Europe from France to Ukraine, including most of what Marija Gimbutas called Old Europe. In 1986, she attended and co-sponsored a conference on modern human origins at the School of American Research, Santa Fe.^[8] She has developed a close friendship with Doctor Jean Clottes of France, who was responsible for the exploration of the Cosquer Cave discovered in 1985 and the Chauvet Cave discovered in 1994.^[9][10]

In October 2008, Auel was named an Officer of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture and Communication.^[11]

Bibliography[edit]

By 1990, Auel's first three books in her Earth's Children series had sold more than 20 million copies worldwide and been translated into 18 languages; Crown Publishers paid Auel about $25 million for the rights to publish The Plains of Passage and the two subsequent volumes.^[12] By May 2002, on the cusp of the publication of the fifth book, the series had sold 34 million books.^[13] The sixth and final book in the series, The Land of Painted Caves, was published in 2011.^[14]

1. The Clan of the Cave Bear, 1980
2. The Valley of Horses, 1982
3. The Mammoth Hunters, 1985
4. The Plains of Passage, 1990
5. The Shelters of Stone, 2002
6. The Land of Painted Caves, 2011

Personal life[edit]

Jean Marie Untinen married Ray Bernard Auel after high school. They have five children and live in Portland, Oregon^[3] in the Goose Hollow neighborhood.^[15]

References[edit]

External links[edit]

JEAN GRAINGER

USA TODAY BESTSELLING AUTHOR

SELECTED BY BOOKBUB READERS IN TOP 19 OF HISTORICAL FICTION BOOKS.

WINNER OF THE 2016 AUTHOR'S CIRCLE HISTORICAL NOVEL OF EXCELLENCE

'Warm and wise, reading a Jean Grainger novel is like sitting in the kitchen of a friend. Her authentic writing welcomes you into the heart of Ireland.' Kate Kerrigan, NYT Bestselling Author.

'In the same magical tradition as classic Irish storytellers, Maeve Binchy and Frank McCourt, Jean Grainger transports the reader into a world where the characters not only come alive, but become friends, who stay with you long after you've closed the last page. I have no doubt that Jean Grainger will be considered one of the finest historical novelists of our time.' Roberta Kagan, Bestselling author of 'All My Love, Detrick' series.

Hello and thanks for taking time out to check out my page. If you're wondering what you're getting with my books then think of the late great Maeve Binchy but sometimes with a historical twist. I was born in Cork, Ireland in 1971 and I come from a large family of storytellers, so much so that we had to have 'The Talking Spoon', only the person holding the spoon could talk!

I have worked as a history lecturer at University, a teacher of English, History and Drama in secondary school, a playwright, and a tour guide of my beloved Ireland. I am married to the lovely Diarmuid and we have four children. We live in a 200 year old stone cottage in Mid-Cork with my family and the world's smallest dogs, called Scrappy and Scoobi..

My experiences leading groups, mainly from the United States, led me to write my first novel, 'The Tour'. My observances of the often funny, sometimes sad but always interesting events on tours fascinated me. People really did confide the most extraordinary things, the safety of strangers I suppose. It's a fictional story set on a tour bus but many of the characters are based on people I met over the years.

The sequel to The Tour, called Safe at the Edge of the World, follows Conor O'Shea once again as he takes another motley crew on a tour of Ireland. This time with a very odd couple aboard who seem to be hiding something.

The third Tour book in that series is called The Story of Grenville King and in it Conor gets an opportunity to renovate and run an old castle as a five star resort, but something isn't quite right, and the castle has many secrets.

The fourth Conor O'Shea book is called The Homecoming of Bubbles O'Leary and features a group of friends taking their friend Bubbles home to Ireland from New York, on last time. The next book is based on a chance conversation with a friend about the reality of DNA testing and the truths it might revel unwittingly. It's called Finding Billie Romano and the sixth book finds Conor and his pals in dire financial straits and the only life line is a reality TV show in the castle, something Conor hates the idea of but needs must!

My first World War 2 novel, 'So Much Owed' is a family saga based in Ireland following the Buckley family of Dunderrig House. The story opens in the trenches of WW1 at the end of the war and moves to tranquil West Cork. As the next generation of the Buckley family find themselves embroiled once again in war, the action moves from Ireland to wartime Belfast, from occupied France to the inner sanctum of German society in neutral Dublin. The history of the period was my academic specialty so I'm delighted to be able to use it in a work of fiction.

Shadow of a Century, is set in New York in 2015 as well as in Dublin during the events of Easter Week 1916, where Irish men and women fought valiantly to rid our island of British Imperialism. While not my academic specialty, I loved researching this book. My husband, most fortunately for me is an expert on this era and so I didn't have to go too far for assistance. The story features three very strong women, united through a battered old flag. Its essentially a love story, but with a bit of intrigue thrown in for good measure.

Under Heaven's Shining Stars, was published in 2016 and is set in my home city of Cork. This time its against the backdrop of 1950s and 60s Ireland and it really is a book about friendship, family and the Catholic church. I have a deep personal affinity with all of my characters but this book is especially close to my heart.

A book I wrote while travelling with my family for a year in Australia is called Sisters of the Southern Cross and don't forget to read the afterword on that one as to how that story came about, its a tale stranger than fiction in its own right!

I wrote a novel called Letters of Freedom after hearing a woman on the radio one day explaining how being raised in state care prepared a person so poorly for the realities of independent living. Her story was so moving I was inspired to write a short novella there and then.

Carmel's story really seemed to touch people, and I got such a huge reaction from readers all over the world, many of them telling me the most extraordinary stories from their own lives, I wrote a sequel. The Future's Not Ours To See, which follows Carmel as she ventures forth into a world she knows so little of is out now. The third Carmel and Sharif book, What Will be, is also available and it finishes the story of this woman who spent her entire childhood believing something that wasn't true. She returns to Ireland, very reluctantly and discovers that in order to go forward she has to first make peace with her past.

My next series, The Robinswood Story, opens with What Once Was True, and tells the story of a big old house in Co Waterford during WW2. Two families live there, the impoverished Keneficks who own it and the hard-working Murphys who work for them. Life has remained unchanged for centuries but when war comes, it means everything changes and people have to question what once was true. This book was selected by Bookbub readers as in the top 19 Historical Fiction books of 2018. The sequel to this, Return to Robinswood, continues the story and the final instalment, Trials and Tribulations takes it to it's conclusion.

The Star and the Shamrock, the Emerald Horizon, The Hard Way Home and The World Starts Anew is a series of four books about two little German Jewish children who find themselves on the Kindertransport out of Berlin. They end up in Northern Ireland and it was a real labour of love. The research was harrowing at times, but I hope I've done justice to the stories of so many children who escaped the Nazi terror, often never again to see their parents. This is a book of hope in dark times, of the enduring power of love and the incredible resilience of the human spirit.

My current series, The Queenstown Series, centres on twelve year old Harp Devereaux and her mother Rose and the first book opens on the day Titanic sails from Queenstown, Co Cork on her last fateful journey. It is a bestselling series and people really seem to connect to the precocious Harp and her hard-working mother as they battle to survive in a society where conforming and playing by the rules was paramount. It is so far a three book series, The West's Awake, and The Harp and the Rose being the next two books but I'm currently writing book four.

Many of the people who have reviewed my books have said that you get to know the characters and really become attached to them, that's wonderful for me to hear because that's how I feel about them too. I grew up on Maeve Binchy and Deirdre Purcell and I aspired to being like them. If you buy one of my books I'm very grateful and I really hope you enjoy it. If you do, or even if you don't, please take the time to post a review. Writing is a source of constant contentment to me and I am so fortunate to have the time and the inclination to do it, but to read a review written by a reader really does make my day.

French writer

Jean Giono (30 March 1895 – 8 October 1970) was a French author who wrote works of fiction mostly set in the Provence region of France.

First period[edit]

Jean Giono was born to a family of modest means, his father a cobbler of Piedmontese descent^[1] and his mother a laundry woman. He spent the majority of his life in Manosque, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence. Forced by family needs to leave school at the age of sixteen and get a job in a bank, he nevertheless continued to read voraciously, in particular the great classic works of literature including the Bible, Homer's Iliad, the works of Virgil, and the Tragiques of Agrippa d'Aubigné. He continued to work at the bank until he was called up for military service at the outbreak of World War I, and the horrors he experienced on the front lines turned him into an ardent and lifelong pacifist. In 1919, he returned to the bank, and a year later, married a childhood friend with whom he had two children. Following the success of his first published novel, Colline (1929) (which won him the Prix Brentano earned $1,000, and drew an English translation of the book^[2]), he left the bank in 1930 to devote himself to writing on a full-time basis.^[3]

Colline was followed by two more novels heavily influenced by Virgil and Homer, Un de Baumugnes (1929) and Regain (1930), the three together comprising the famous “Pan trilogy”, so-called because in it Giono depicts the natural world as being imbued with the power of the Greek god Pan. The other novels Giono published during the nineteen-thirties on the whole continued in the same vein—set in Provence, with peasants as protagonists, and displaying a pantheistic view of nature.^[4]Marcel Pagnol based three of his films on Giono's work of this period: Regain, starting Fernandel and with music by Honegger; Angèle, and La Femme du boulanger, with the actor Raimu.^[4]

Throughout the nineteen-thirties, Giono expressed the pacifism he had adopted as a result of his experiences during World War I in novels such as Le grand troupeau (1931), and pamphlets such as Refus d’obéissance (1937), and the Lettre aux paysans sur la pauvreté et la paix (1938).^[4] This in turn resulted in his forming a relationship with a group of like-minded people including Lucien Jacques and Henri Fluchère among others, who gathered each year in the hamlet of Contadour, and whose pacifist writings were published as the Cahiers du Contadour.^[5]

In 1937, he famously asked, "What is the worst that can happen if Germany invades France?"^[6]

Transition[edit]

The end of the nineteen-thirties brought a crisis in Giono's life. As far as his writing was concerned, he had come to feel that it was time to stop “doing Giono” (faire du Giono), and to take his work in a new direction.^[7] At the same time it was becoming apparent that his work for pacifism was a failure, and that another war was inevitable and fast approaching. The declaration of war on 1 September 1939 came while the Contadoureans were assembled for their annual reunion. The result of Giono's former peace-making efforts was that he was briefly imprisoned as a Nazi sympathiser before the proceedings were dropped without any charges being laid.^[3]

The subsequent period of renewal saw the self-educated Giono now turn to Stendhal as a literary model in the same way as previously he had been influenced by the Classics. His novels thus began to be set in a specific time and place, confronting the protagonists with specific politics, issues, causes and events, in contrast with the timelessness of his earlier work. He also adopted the Stendhalian narrative technique of letting the reader into the experience of the protagonist by means of the interior monologue, whereas the dominant technique of his earlier novels had been that of the omniscient narrator.^[8]

He similarly formed the ambition of writing a sequence of ten novels inspired by Balzac’s Comédie humaine, in which he would depict characters from all strata of society rather than peasants, and compare and contrast different moments in history by depicting the experiences of members of the same family in times a hundred years apart. This project was never realised, with only the four Hussard novels, (Angelo (1958), Le Hussard sur le Toit (1951), Le Bonheur fou (1957), Mort d’un personnage (1948)) actually completed according to plan, but it is echoed in Giono's postwar work in the dichotomy between historical novels set in the mid-nineteenth century, and contemporary novels set in the mid-twentieth.^[9] His newfound interest in history even led to his writing an actual history book, Le Désastre de Pavie (1963).

As he began to focus on the human being rather than the natural world, his understanding of psychology and motivation was also influenced by the writings of Niccolò Machiavelli, whose analysis helped him to articulate a much darker view of human nature in his later years, and about whom he wrote the article "Monsieur Machiavel, ou le coeur humain dévoilé" (1951).

In 1944, when France was liberated, Giono was again accused of collaboration with the Nazis, and was again imprisoned for five months before he was freed without charges ever being made.^[8] This led to his being blacklisted, so that for three years he was barred from publication. It was during this period of ostracism that he began in 1945 to write Angelo, metaphorically the laboratory in which he experimented, tested and attempted to integrate his new approach to his work. It contains not only a first version of the story of Angélo Pardi that took its final form in Le Hussard sur le toit and Le Bonheur fou, but also the nucleus of many other works of his second period, and makes use of new narrative techniques he developed further in other novels. He ultimately set it aside, no doubt considering it too derivative, and moved on to the other projects it gave rise to.^[4]

Second period[edit]

The first major novel of his second period to be published was Un roi sans divertissement (published in 1947, and made into a successful film for which Giono himself wrote the screenplay, in 1963). It takes the form of a detective story set in Haute Provence in the early nineteenth century, and reveals Giono's new pessimism about human nature in that the policeman is forced to the realisation that he himself is capable of being as evil as the murderer he is tracking. Stylistically brilliant, it consists of the juxtaposed accounts of events as told by the different people affected, devoid of explanation, from which the reader must piece together the meaning.^[4]

The most famous novel of his second period is Le Hussard sur le toit, the first part of the definitive version of the story of Angélo Pardi he had sketched in Angelo. It was published in 1951, and made into a film by Jean-Paul Rappeneau starring Juliette Binoche in 1995. Angélo, like Stendhal's Fabrice del Dongo (La Chartreuse de Parme) on whom he is modeled, is a chivalrous romantic whose quest constitutes an inquiry into the nature of happiness, while the cholera epidemic he finds himself confronted with in Provence in 1832 is an allegory for the wars that had so deeply affected Giono. In structure it is a picaresque series of episodes, full of evocative descriptions of the country. Its sequel, Le Bonheur fou (The Straw Man) (1957) follows Angélo in the Italy of the 1848 revolution.

Les Ames fortes (1950), filmed by Raoul Ruiz in 2001, is another of the masterpieces of this period. As dark as Un Roi sans divertissement, it examines the depths a person can sink to in greed, grasping self-interest and the exploitation of others. Also as in Un Roi sans divertissement, the story is again told purely in the words of the protagonists, without the intervention of a narrator or comment from the author, thus forcing readers to reach their own conclusions. Les Grands chemins (1951), considerably less dark, deals with the nature of the road, gambling, the lie, and friendship, again in a first-person narration entirely in the voice of the protagonist and devoid of explanation or elucidation from the author.^[8]

Also worthy of mention is his Voyage en Italie (1953). Neither a travel guide nor a straightforward account of a trip as the name suggests, this is a highly personal account of Giono's experiences and of the people he meets and sees that tells the reader more about Giono than about Italy.

Outside France, Giono's best-known work is probably the short story The Man who Planted Trees (and 1987 film version). This optimistic tale of a man who brings a deserted valley back to life by planting trees reflects Giono's long-standing love of the natural world, an attitude that made him a precursor to the modern ecological movement. He thus declined to receive any royalties from this text, and granted free use to anyone who wanted to distribute or translate it.^[10]

In his later years, Giono was honoured with the Prince Rainier of Monaco literary prize in 1953, awarded for his lifetime achievements, was elected to the Académie Goncourt in 1954, and became a member of the Conseil Littéraire of Monaco in 1963.^[8]

Giono died of a heart attack in 1970.^[11]

The Collège Jean Giono in Nice is named after him, as are streets in Cannes and Fréjus.

Works[edit]

Main article: Jean Giono bibliography

References[edit]

Further reading[edit]

• "Jean Giono: From Pacifism to Collaboration". TELOS 139 (Summer 2007). New York: Telos Press
• Giono. Pierre Citron, 1990
• Jean Giono et les techniques du roman. Pierre R. Robert, 1961

External links[edit]