Great Fear on the Mountain
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- $23.99
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- $23.99
Publisher Description
A haunting, allegorical Swiss masterpiece centered around a posse of villagers as they brave dark elements to ascend a mountain, thicketed with lore
Teeming with tension, this immersive, rhapsodic story transports readers to the Swiss mountainside, bringing to mind the writing of Thomas Mann while offering character studies as vivid and bracing as Eudora Welty’s.
Feed is running low in a rural village in Switzerland. The town council meets to decide whether or not to ascend a chimerical mountain in order to access the open pastures that have enough grass to “feed seventy animals all summer long.” The elders of the town protest, warning of the dangers and the dreadful lore that enfolds the mountain passageways like thick fog.
They’ve seen it all before, reckoning with the loss of animals and men who have tried to reach the pastures nearly twenty years ago. The younger men don’t listen, making plans to set off on their journey despite all warnings. Strange things happen. Spirits wrestle with headstrong young men. As the terror of life on the mountain builds, Ramuz’s writing captures the rural dialog and mindsets of the men.
One of the most talented translators working today, Bill Johnston captures the careful and sublime twists and turns of the original in his breathtaking translation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Nature's terrifying power is on display in a new translation of this breathtaking 1926 novel from Swiss writer Ramuz (1878–1947). The people of an impoverished mountain village decide, after fierce debate, to make up for their dwindling resources by using a high-up pasture where, according to lore, a group of their townsfolk met a terrible fate 20 years earlier. Six men and a 13-year-old boy ascend to the pasture with provisions and 70 cows. Their plan: to last the summer in that remote place, tending to the animals that sustain life in the village. Once they reach the pasture, a member of the party who survived the earlier expedition tells the others of the horrors he saw back then, among them a man who turned "all black and swollen" and died after a splinter got stuck in his thumb. The cowherds soon face horrors of their own, as sickness decimates the cattle and one of the men shoots his hand off in a strange accident. Lush prose (snowy mountain peaks seem "made of metal, of gold, steel, of silver; making all around you a sort of jeweled crown"), and profound insights about the insignificance of human life and the force of superstition pave the way to an earth-shattering finale. This thrilling tale has a timeless potency.
