Pig Earth by John Berger

I found this little gem of a book, Pig Earth by John Berger, in the used book store in Kent, and, in anticipation of my forthcoming hog ownership, I thought it was worth a mention. In some ways, Pig Earth defies description; part essay, part poetry, part fiction, the work floats in the odd space between all three. The truth is, I had never heard of the book, and had I not stumbled upon in on the 'farming' shelf of the store (how sweet is it that there was even a 'farming' shelf?), I doubt I'd have ever come across it. But who can deny the magnetic appeal of a dust jacket featuring a bloody butcher draped in a cow's earthly remains? Not I.

Pig Earth is apparently the first of a rustic trilogy, Into Their Labors, a trilogy I will soon be searching out. Set in Berger's adopted home of rural, trans-alpine France, the book seeks to sketch the life, and death, of peasant culture. Such an attempt, by a foreign author (Berger is English) could and perhaps should come across as an attempt at romanticism or anthropological study. But there is fairly little of the life Berger portrays that is romanticized, and though he seems to mourn the passing of peasant existence, he understands the causes. He addresses his role as outsider and erstwhile chronicler bluntly and succinctly in a well-woven introduction, and because we buy Berger's earnestness, we follow him willingly into the lives of the men and women he writes of.

So what does he actually write about? Issues and events at once both banal and vital. An old woman leads a doe goat to be mated on a winter night, an orchard keeper runs up against the injustice of law, a pig is killed, a calf is born, generations pass...every event, isolated and magnified, becomes important for its own sake. The poetry, while not the strongest ever written, in interspersed between the prose pieces, and has an erie way of making the stories float in a seemingly surreal medium, un-grounding tales which are individually dense and earthy.

As a whole, the book is delightfully unsettling, a taste of a by-gone time and place, where the tractor was an invader and the daily ritual of labor was everything. It's a taste of something completely alien, a life both simple and hard. The writing is passionate, and deft, and makes the agrarian rhythms of work and season take on a spirit that one finds lacking in modernity.

Of course, my own pigs come thursday. Those rhythms may be all too familiar come friday night.