I found this book in the SPD warehouse during last weekend’s open house, and the reason why I was drawn to these Archipelago Books was because they are such lovely productions, lovely textured cardstock covers with French flaps, cream colored thick stock paper body, simple and consistent design, clean serif font; these are understated and elegant productions.The story itself is elusive at first, and this is also due to Jean Giono’s poetic, vivid, vast, involved descriptions of the countryside, the trees, the grass, the texture of the terrain, which are alive and with their own agency. They are the foreground and the narrative is working on their sense of time and space. His narrator, a resident of a nearby village, is at its mercy, but also seems so revitalized to be so close to the earth. A river is a body like a serpent winding its way through the grass. The dialogue and interaction with the potter’s family and the shepherd, who live so far outside of the village, seems very “inside,” in tune with the countryside, and Giono mediates very little such that our understanding as readers I think grows with the same slowness that the narrator’s does.All of this I realize later on sets us up for the shepherds, as what the narrator, Jean finds is this awe, almost enthrallment with the shepherd as a “master of beasts.” In the sheepshed, the shepherd tells the narrator of the universe of stars; the master of beasts has uttered one word or utterance, and all the thousands of sheep eyes in the dark reflect the glow of the lantern as they all look to him. This is like the night sky. This vastness, this universe, is what the shepherd leads. The flock follows him into the countryside, again, like a river, one body. This river of sheep moving as one body is a serpent of stars. Any power that man has in villages of men, any papers and wealth he may hold, is tiny when compared to the power a young shepherd awakens into when he stops trying to exert his shepherd-ness and finds he simply is one.What the narrative leads up to is the shepherd’s play, in which many shepherds and their flocks of tens of thousands of sheep converge in a faraway clearing to “perform” a semi-rehearsed, semi-improvisational “play,” in which one central narrator acts the part of Earth, calls upon Sea, Mountain, River, Beast, in search of Man. It is at the moment of the calling that one shepherd will stand up among the congregation and take upon himself the part, spontaneously composing these poetic monologues/in dialogue with one another. So the narrative of this performance shifts and turns as each shepherd both speaks the poetry he’s been thinking on for the past year while roaming the countryside with his flock. Each has had so much mental and geographical space and human silence, with the elements, again the trees, the sky, the wind, the rivers, and the beasts as his only companions.I am gleaning this all from the text itself, its turning narratives, and then from the author’s very poetic footnotes, which reveal the interaction of the actors, who really are trying to verbally best one another in favor of both the power of his own soliloquy, and the direction in which he desires the narrative to flow. So this “control” which each poetically skilled shepherd “exerts” over the narrative’s turns I think mirrors the kind of mastery of the beasts, which the narrator views with much awe.
