Our March reading group selection is A King Alone by Jean Giono. The reading group will meet Wednesday, March 27 at 7 p.m online via Zoom. The Zoom link will be sent on the afternoon of the meeting to anyone interested in attending. Email bookbeatorders@gmail.com to sign up. Books are expected to be in stock soon and discounted 15%. It is a shorter text this month and we will send another notification to reading group subscribers when copies arrive. The Book Beat reading group features international works in translation, and discussions are free and open to the public. Please call (248) 968-1190 for more information.
An existential detective story by one of France’s most popular modern writers, set in a mid-nineteenth century mountain village, available in English for the first time.
A King Alone is set in a remote Alpine village that is cut off from the world by rugged mountains and by long months when the ground is covered with snow and the heavens with cloud. One such winter, villagers begin mysteriously to disappear. Soon the village is paralyzed by terror, which gives way to relief and eager anticipation when the outsider Langlois arrives to investigate. What he discovers, however, will leave no one reassured, and his reappearance in the village a few years later, now assigned the task of guarding it from wolves, awakens those troubling memories. A man of few words, a regal manner, and military efficiency, Langlois baffles and fascinates the villagers, whose different responses to him shape Jean Giono’s increasingly charged narrative. This novel about a tiny community at the dangerous edge of things and a man of law who is a man alone could be described as a metaphysical Western. It unfolds with the uncanny inevitability and disturbing intensity of a dream.
“Langlois is as mysterious as Sam Spade….The haunting beauty of this novel lies precisely in its lacunae. This is a book rich with details . . . everything except what we are most longing to know, Langlois’s thoughts. We must do all the work ourselves.” –Edmund White, The New York Review of Books
“Strange and disquieting . . . the twisting narrative reads like a game of telephone passed through generations, with Langlois at the center as a sort of legendary totem to the villagers.” —Publishers Weekly
Listen to an interview/podcast with Giono’s translater Ayson Waters:
Here is a short film on Giono’s most famous story: “The Man Who Planted Seeds”
Jean Giono (1895-1970) was born and lived most of his life in the town of Manosque, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence. Largely self-educated, he started working as a bank clerk at the age of sixteen and reported for military service when World War I broke out. After the success of Hill, which won the Prix Brentano, he left the bank and began to publish prolifically. During World War II his outspoken pacifism led some to accuse him, unjustly, of defeatism and collaboration with the Nazis. After France’s liberation in 1944, he was imprisoned and held without charges. Despite being blacklisted after his release, Giono continued writing and achieved renewed success. He was elected to the Académie Goncourt in 1954. NYRB Classics publishes Giono’s Hill and Melville.