The Open Road

by Jean Giono, Paul Eprile (Translator), Jacques Le Gall (Preface by)

Overview

A nomad and a swindler embark on an eccentric road trip in this picaresque, philosophical novel by the author of The Man Who Planted Trees.

The south of France, 1950: A solitary vagabond walks through the villages, towns, valleys, and foothills of the region between northern Provence and the Alps. He picks up work along the way and spends the winter as the custodian of a walnut-oil mill. He also picks up a problematic companion: a cardsharp and con man, whom he calls “the Artist.”

The action moves from place to place, and episode to episode, in truly picaresque fashion. Everything is told in the first person, present tense, by the vagabond narrator, who goes unnamed. He himself is a curious combination of qualities—poetic, resentful, cynical, compassionate, flirtatious, and self-absorbed. 

While The Open Road can be read as loosely strung entertainment, interspersed with caustic reflections, it can also be interpreted as a projection of the relationship of author, art, and audience. But it is ultimately an exploration of the tensions and boundaries between affection and commitment, and of the competing needs for solitude, independence, and human bonds. As always in Jean Giono, the language is rich in natural imagery and as ruggedly idiomatic as it is lyrical.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781681375113
Publisher:	New York Review Books
Publication date:	10/12/2021
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Jean Giono (1895–1970) was born and lived most of his life in the town of Manosque, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence. He was elected to the Académie Goncourt in 1954. Three of his novels, Hill, Melville, and A King Alone, are available from NYRB Classics.

Paul Eprile is a publisher, poet, and translator. He was a co-winner of the 2018 Annual Translation Prize of the French-American Foundation for his translation of Jean Giono’s Melville. He lives on the Niagara Escarpment in Ontario, Canada.

Jacques Le Gall is Professor of Literature at the University of Pau and one of France's foremost interpreters of Jean Giono's works. He contributed extensively to the monumental Dictionnaire Giono.

Editorial Reviews

"Giono the writer is not interested in reality, regional or otherwise, until it becomes mythological." —Michael Wood, London Review of Books

"Paul Eprile has rendered Giono's Les Grands Chemins with all of the original's propulsive energy, and with attention to the diction, costumes, and mores of the immediate postwar period. Veering through a landscape of forests, villages, farmsteads, and mills, Giono's vagabond narrator at once yearns for a hearth and pushes on blindly, treacherously, to the horizon, drawing the reader under the spell of his continuous present tense. In this luminous picaresque, Giono gradually unveils the tensions between necessity and risk, work and grace, that stand at the heart of the novelist's vocation itself." —Susan Stewart, author of The Ruins Lesson: Meaning and Material in Western Culture

"Plenty of novelists withhold information about their narrators, names included. Plenty of novelists also take risks with time and pacing. What makes this novel stand out is the meticulous care that Giono applies to both his narrator’s voice and the ways in which he experiences time. . . . Shifting between lived-in details and a sense of alienation, this novel is frequently hypnotic and always compelling." —Kirkus, starred review

"[Giono’s] fictional Provence has all the mythic sweep of Melville and the closely observed grotesquery of Faulkner. . . . [The Open Road’s] nameless narrator unfurls the story in the present tense, without chapter breaks, deluging his reader with aphorism, cliché, and commentary as he strolls, hikes, and hitches from the Alps to the south of Provence. . . . Does his attraction [to The Artist] come from the loneliness of the road, or somewhere deeper? Giono hints, but never says." —Robert Rubsam, The Baffler

“This 1951 novel shows another side [to Jean Giono]. . . [The Open Road is] punctuated with spirited descriptions of card playing, drinking and bad weather. . . A story where nothing happens but everything happens.” —John Self, “The Best Recent Translated Fiction,” The Guardian

“[The Open Road] slides down the throat like an oyster—an unusual, not unpleasant sensation, designed to be gulped down whole. . . . The pages turn almost by themselves. . . It’s a joy to read a book that knows exactly what it’s about and what it’s doing, one where the form and the plot are profoundly intertwined into a remarkable interlude.” —Sarah Manvel, Bookmunch

From the Publisher

★ 2021-06-16
Giono’s novel—published in French in 1951 and translated into English for the first time—follows the changing fortunes of a nameless wanderer.

Plenty of novelists withhold information about their narrators, names included. Plenty of novelists also take risks with time and pacing. What makes this novel stand out is the meticulous care that Giono applies to both his narrator’s voice and the ways in which he experiences time. A surface-level description would reveal that the novel follows a solitary man in his late 40s or early 50s making his way around central Europe looking for work. But from the outset, Giono also guides the narrative with a complex precision—in one moment, the narrator is approaching a village, for instance, and in the next he’s already miles past it. The effect can be dizzying and positions this book as a literary ancestor of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled(1995) or the novels of João Gilberto Noll. Giono proceeds in an episodic manner, sometimes zeroing in on the narrator’s time working at a particular job and sometimes finding him confronted with the violent actions of others. And there are moments when the narrator demonstrates a sense of wry wit, as in this conversational exchange: “I tell him how I was the personal valet, so to speak, of Dr. Ch., a guy from Paris who dealt with loonies and sex addicts. He tells me the name for that is a psychiatrist, which I already knew.”

Shifting between lived-in details and a sense of alienation, this novel is frequently hypnotic and always compelling.

Kirkus Reviews