Into Their Labours

In the early 1970s, at the height of his fame, novelist and art critic John Berger moved to a small Alpine village in the Haute-Savoie. There he worked for nearly two decades on Into Their Labours, a trilogy of works that blend stories, essays, and poems to chronicle European peasant culture and its gradual eclipse in the twentieth century. With a tenderness free of nostalgia, Berger writes of a traditional, earthbound world which is being left behind by the technocratic forces of markets and capitalism.

In Pig Earth, the lives of men and women in a mountain village are still governed by ancient cycles of calves born and pigs slaughtered, of summer haymaking and long dark winters of rest. In Once in Europa, the old ways have been upended by machinery and modernization, in the tumult of which love’s labors are lost and found in turn. And in Lilac and Flag, the village has been forsaken as the children and grandchildren of rural peasants pursue meagre livings as best they can in alien metropolises.

At once an ode to the resilience and passion of peasants, a blistering critique of capitalist progress and productivity, and a prescient and compassionate portrait of urban migration, which has hollowed out rural villages and towns everywhere, Into Their Labours is a literary tour-de-force, on par with the best of Zola and Dickens.