Ennemonde et autres caractères

by Jean Giono

"Le visage était sympathique, malgré la perte de toutes ses dents, ses lèvres étaient assez charnues pour rester épanouies. Elle avait un joli teint frais et rose, ses yeux marron étaient très purs, sans rides ni cernes, avec de longs cils courbes. Leur regard était parfois celui d'une jeune fille, le plus souvent non. Elle pesait plus de cent trente kilos, mais qu'elle déplaçait avec une agilité surprenante."

Genres: France, Fiction, French Literature

169 pages, Pocket Book

First published January 1, 1968

About the author

Jean Giono, the only son of a cobbler and a laundress, was one of France's greatest writers. His prodigious literary output included stories, essays, poetry, plays, film scripts, translations and over thirty novels, many of which have been translated into English.

Giono was a pacifist, and was twice imprisoned in France at the outset and conclusion of World War II.

He remained tied to Provence and Manosque, the little city where he was born in 1895 and, in 1970, died.

Giono was awarded the Prix Bretano, the Prix de Monaco (for the most outstanding collected work by a French writer), the Légion d'Honneur, and he was a member of the Académie Goncourt.

Reviews

[lark benobi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading this novel feels like you've just bought a ticket for a ride at an amusement park, when you're not quite sure if you want to go on this ride at all, but you get on anyway, because your friend says it's going to be so much fun, and at some point during the ride you know your friend was sorely mistaken, because you're well on your way to a vertiginous and unpleasant and embarrassing outcome if the ride doesn't end soon, but then the ride does end. and you think: wow, that was incredible, and get back in line for another turn.

[Judy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I got this book via my Archipelago subscription. I have read one other book by Jean Giono and I love the way he writes. Even when I am not familiar with some of his subjects, I am able to just hover above his stylish yet amusing sentences making out what I can.

When I think of France, I usually think of Paris which is the only place I have been in France. Of course the country has many kinds of areas and subcultures. Ennemonde is set in the High Country, also known as Alpes de Haute-Provence, where the author grew up. Mountains, rivers, gorges, villages and, at least in this book, a bit of an outlaw aspect.

Ennemonde Girard is a 300 pound woman who lives by her own independent views, some of which are distinctly criminal. I found her story alluring though I could not always make sense of it. Her level of cunning is as high as she is large. Sometimes her treatment of people is as bizarre as Giono's descriptions of her body.

I think M. Giono has a tremendous love for people and an abhorrence of judging anyone. He see the human comedy for what it is. I guess that is why I enjoyed Ennemonde so much.

[Phyllis · Rating 5 out of 5]

This short little enigma of a novel is full of the most evocative imagery I think I've ever read. The story is told in digression swirling around digression, meandering and diving and frolicking and ambling here and there, but somehow always landing back in the story. The setting is the 35 mile by approximately 15 mile area that is the "High Country" of the French Alps -- a place that is as much of a character in the novel as any person. The book was originally published in French in 1968 and translated into English for publication in 2021.

A part of the tale begins when a bloodstained corduroy jacket is found. "[T]here was never any crime up here, except for one incident in 1928, and that one was precisely about what everyone is afraid of. Everyone is afraid of loneliness." But for the most part this is the story of Ennemonde. "The young women, while they're still maidens, possess a fruit-like beauty; then the beauty bursts, and fragments of it can be seen in their children. Truly nothing remains of these women's former state. Some Venuses turn into fearsome monsters; almost all of them have seventeenth-century mouths, toothless or, even worse, with a handful of loose teeth on which they suck. It's pretty ghastly. But their simple-minded appearance shouldn't be taken at face value. Almost all of them are commanding women. With their back to the wall they achieve wonders. People still remember Ennemonde Girard."

There are several deaths. Some might be accidents. "There's a way of behaving toward this land that was perfected by our ancestors and that has produced excellent results; indeed, it's the only way: you shape yourself to it. Every accident that's been seen to happen here -- and they're countless in number, including many that are strange indeed -- comes from some infringement of these sorts of rules or laws." Some might be more intentional. And at the end of Part I, you likely think you understand what happened, although the book forewarns that "[t]he game will certainly not be revealed in its entirety, that's not to be expected; ..."

Then comes Part II.

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although originally published in France in 1968, set in France’s rural “High Country,” and beginning roughly World War I, much of Jean Giono’s Ennemonde sounds like present-day U.S.: a mash-up between Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County and the average Trump supporter.

“The tool that people around here have most often in their hand is a shotgun, whether it’s for hunting or for, let’s say, philosophical reflection; in either case, there’s no solution without a shot being fired. . . Monsieur Sartre would not be of much use here; a shotgun, on the other hand, comes in handy in many situations.”

“It’s not that these folks are worse than others; it’s that, individualists to an extreme and incurably solitary, they’re constantly afraid of being duped. And if love does that often (makes you a dupe), hatred never does; there you’re on solid ground. I love you: that’s never sure; proof is needed. I hate you: that’s solid as gold bullion.”

“The Protestants of these parts had since time immemorial protested against Protestantism. They’d ended up worshipping anything at all, so long as the anything at all demanded intolerance. Crown of thorns were consumed in every household, at every meal. Religion was a sort of commerce in which discomfort was always preferred to joy, scorn to pleasure, and ultimately vice to virtue.”

Violence, hatred, and discomfort are forces of nature entwined with nature—animal, vegetable, and weather-driven—red in claw and tooth and the ultimate arbiter of truth, unforgivingly so.

Ennemonde is the story’s titular heroine, a toothless obese woman (280 lbs.), honest but otherwise amoral. She struggles for and wins unstinting respect from the folks in her area, buying, selling, and raising sheep. Giono clearly respects and admires Ennemonde, too, for all her amorality. Her fight for respect in a male-dominated patriarchal world is not a feminist battle—Ennemonde would destroy any woman who stood in her way, as well. Giono’s argument is that anybody who wanted to achieve Ennemonde’s modicum of material comfort would have been required to do the same.

Ennedmonde’s way—nature’s way—is not to ostentatiously shove others aside. That sort of arrogance, coming from either men or women, will be met by the community with resistance and will be shortly put down, one way or the other. Instead, the way to success is through silence and cunning, as Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus would have it (exile is to be avoided). The High Country consists of subsistence-level shepherds, either with small families or living by themselves in one-room huts, hidden in dales beneath trees. Reputation matters more than money, and everybody knows each other’s business by what they hear, see, and smell in the wind. Revenge may take decades to arrive and appear in the form of the natural consequences of farm life.

In the second part of the book, an addendum of sorts, Giono seems to build a case for Ennemonde being a natural conclusion from the environment of the High Country, not a one-off. Thus, Ennemonde’s decisions to disrupt legal, ethical, and cultural traditions make sense in a world that never even pretended to uphold notions of Christian morality.

For more of my reviews, please see https://www.thebookbeat.com/backroom/...

[v · Rating 3 out of 5]

The plateaus and mudflats of Provence were home to some strange types in the last century -- most centuries, rather. They tended to the perverted basket cases properly known as sheep and cattle; they killed and cuckolded one another with a vengeance. Jean Giono intersperses the stories of a small band of such characters with earthy scenery and philosophy. I gulped it down -- it's all very good -- but his stories don't have quite the heft I'd want.

In 1944 Louis came out of prison. He'd been put away for two months for some nonsense; he was innocent, though it had taken him two months to realize it.

[Theediscerning · Rating 1 out of 5]

In a most singular rural area of France, remarkable events and remarkable people take their place in folklore in a wispy, dreamlike way. Some people are certain a man lived up a tree for two years, dining on crows' eggs and sucking their blood when he got thirsty, until they got their revenge; other people are happy to admit it might be true but they're just not in the know. In this strange world where people are hours' hike away from anyone else there are some strange things to testify to knowing, and no mistake. Word might get around about the bloke with a sixty-year unrequited passion for someone, and how he cut a path through the woods to her house so he could spy on the guys getting there first with his expensive telescope. A lot of these instances, along with the interminable descriptions of the landscape, the skies and the people, will quite often seem to get in the way here. They are, after all, not really the people we're concerned with.

What we are concerned with is the titular character, a lovely woman to look at, ruined by dropping a child a year for thirteen years, left now with no teeth and rather a lot of sagging bulk. She's kept the force that made her something to reckon with, and installed her oldest sons as the male heads of the household instead of her milksop husband. And she's going to get her lover, and she's going to install him in the abandoned house of a neighbour – a neighbour who abandoned the house by dint of being found headless, dragged about the countryside by his two dogs for two days. and a neighbour who allegedly left a fortune squirrelled away somewhere.

Frustratingly, however, this book is not even really about him and them. And that what formed my ultimate impression of this woolly, impressionistic mess – that it's not really about anything. Or anything narrative, I'll grant you – it is about showing a certain milieu, and the author showing off when discussing the results of a rural slaughterman's visit. The author wants to convey place – so much so that the second piece here, unheralded as it was by any contents page or mention of it in the blurb – took so long to get going I never found if it did.

So if you love the concision of "The Man Who Planted Trees", or felt a shortish book would wake you up to the author of "The Horseman on the Roof" - I dare say you're thinking again. "...Trees" is well worth anyone's time. This, seemingly getting it's no-rush, 'well it's been fifty years, so we might as well' debut translation, is not, unfortunately. One and a half stars.

[Mandy · Rating 1 out of 5]

The French title of this book is Ennemonde and Other Characters, and I really think the publisher and author of this new translation should have stuck to that, as it gives of better idea of the novel, which is really an overview of a peasant community in the Camargue, even though, admittedly, Ennemonde herself is the most prominent person to be featured. There’s also a second narrative which appears without warning towards the end, and it took me a while to realise that it’s not actually connected to the main story. An introduction wouldn’t have gone amiss either. Perhaps the publisher should take note. Be that as it may, I didn’t enjoy this. There are some vivid and evocative descriptions of the natural world and the countryside, but the characters in general are so eccentric as to be caricatures, and Ennemonde herself equally so. I couldn’t relate to them, and became bored with the descriptions of the land and peasant life. Jean Giono is a much acclaimed French writer but I don’t think this short work will attract many new readers.

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

The sky is transparent, the air heady. The wind makes the sound of the sea in the fir trees. The grass bends, the lavender quivers. The tiles clink as if someone were walking on the roof. The wind makes the water tanks boom. The roads are smoking with dust, the beech trees shaking, the birches swaying, the poplars glittering; the wind runs through the grass like a fox. The arch of the walls makes a whistling sound. The latches dance against their keepers. The shutter hooks rattle; a stable door creaks. Wisps of straw blow about. The wind tumbles flocks of starlings the way a stream tumbles masses of serpentine. A crow is trapped in the middle of the sky, and calls out. It's already far away. It can no longer be heard. It vanishes. The wind has no thickness, yet it dims the afternoon light.
[105]

[Daniel Polansky]

Part satire, part epopee to the eponymous, a rural matron of enormous energy, drive and amoral courage. Every work by Jean Giono is distinct from every other work, his ouvre a patchwork whose thematic throughlines is a love of the uncouth and authentically wild, with all its blemishes, over the polished banality of the modern bourgeoisie. Among these works of genuine genius Ennemonde still stands out, as much for the brilliant lyricism of the language as for its unexpected and compelling narrative framework. Loved loved loved this.

[Wyatt strawbridge · Rating 4 out of 5]

Maybe four stars is too high as the book had a strange progression that I at times did not understand, but the parts specifically about Ennemonde were super and the section before and after while not very connected I can’t say I didn’t also like. A fun story about really full and fun characters that do human things and even though they are not always happy and people are not always good the story is good and good things happen to everyone. Not shocking writing or plot just a full story with real people. You know? Just real. Real

[Nuno Miguel · Rating 4 out of 5]

My first Giono and it was good. It has a raw nature to its descriptions of the mediterranean world, his people and the environment around them. Especially the descriptions around peasantry and the animals . Its like a Greek Tragedy in nature form

[Lolo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Deux nouvelles se déroulant tantôt dans le Haut Pays provençal, tantôt en Camargue. On y rencontre de façon plus ou moins fugace divers personnages, dont le principal point commun est la vie dans des territoires isolés avec une forme de respect des traditions, où la nature n'est pas seulement un décor. Des temps et des modes de vie révolus en ces mêmes lieux ; et avec eux, tout ou partie de l'authenticité, du sens et de l'acuité de ce qui faisait le charme de ceux qui les peuplaient. Le style de Giono est un bonheur.

[M.]

Easily one of the best I've ever read.

[Richard Derus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: One of the final novellas by the acclaimed French writer Jean Giono, Ennemonde is a fierce and jubilant portrait of a life intensely lived

Ennemonde Girard: Obese. Toothless. Razor-sharp. Loving mother and murderous wife: a character like none other in literature. In telling us Ennemonde’s astounding story of undetected crimes, Jean Giono immerses us in the perverse and often lurid lifeways of the people of the High Country, where vengeance is an art form, hearts are superfluous, and only boldness and cunning such as Ennemonde’s can win the day. A gleeful, broad sardonic grin of a novel.

"Roads move cautiously around the High Country..." So begins the story of Ennemonde, but also of her sons, daughters, neighbors, lovers, and enemies, and especially of the mountains that stand guard behind their home in the Camargue. This is a place of stark and terrifying beauty, where violence strikes suddenly, whether from the hand of a neighbor or from the sky itself.

Giono captures every wrinkle, glare, and glance with wry delight, celebrating the uniquely tough people whose eyes sparkle with the cruel majesty of the landscape. Full of delectable detours and startling insights, Ennemonde will take you by the hand for an unforgettable tour of this master novelist's singular world.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Not remotely comfortable reading, Giono using this female body's looks and size as commentary on her character and morality. Perfectly ordinary in its time; sixtyish years ago people said terribly cruel things about those larger than, or in any way divergent from, "average."

The young women, while they're still maidens, possess a fruit-like beauty; then the beauty bursts, and fragments of it can be seen in their children. Truly nothing remains of these women's former state. Some Venuses turn into fearsome monsters; almost all of them have seventeenth-century mouths, toothless or, even worse, with a handful of loose teeth on which they suck. It's pretty ghastly. But their simple-minded appearance shouldn't be taken at face value. Almost all of them are commanding women. With their back to the wall they achieve wonders. People still remember Ennemonde Girard.

It does not hit the same register in 2026 as it did in 1968, when it first appeared. It feels false, hostile, spoken for effect in the #MeToo world.

There's probably a good reason for that: the French are not so terribly far from the US despite their fantasies:

The tool that people around here have most often in their hand is a shotgun, whether it’s for hunting or for, let’s say, philosophical reflection; in either case, there’s no solution without a shot being fired...
–and–
The Protestants of these parts had since time immemorial protested against Protestantism. They’d ended up worshipping anything at all, so long as the anything at all demanded intolerance. Crown of thorns were consumed in every household, at every meal. Religion was a sort of commerce in which discomfort was always preferred to joy, scorn to pleasure, and ultimately vice to virtue.

"These parts" are Author Giono's native Provençal mountains, where he lived his life.

It's not so weird after all, fellow intolerant lefties; humans been MAGAts a long damn time.

I can't claim to love this story, I can't tell if it's because I'm a judgmental old man or I'm just a product of the times that brought this novella (150pp barely) into being, holding its subjects up for a cold-eyed considering examination. Author Giono does not vouchsafe a verdict; I do.

Me no likee.

[Tama · Rating 1 out of 5]

I wanted to say it gets lost in historical interests. Regional details of geography and personalities are explained in tangents which don’t seem to relate to the subject of the book—the title misleads one there. When we return to Ennemonde after these anecdotes of country life Ennemonde is a part of all that we have learned about. She plunges headlong into the sin that encompasses her world (not much of any sin).

It is for Kelda Hains that I enjoy historical dining scenes. Like that of the wedding in ‘Madame Bovary.’ And here for the boeuf en daube: 365 day soup, w/ hare, boar and sometimes fox. A kg of bread and a litre of wine. “Rich golden-brown gravy of melted lard and fresh oil” could be more graphically described please etc. I eat at Kelda Hains restaurant for first time in two years on Saturday must name drop this meal idea, although she might be taking Saturdays off atm…

Page 84 over halfway through: a dialogue scene!

“Now it's night, one can no longer tell whether the sky has been bruised over a greater expanse. No sound outside, only the groaning within. It's still winter, at least, that's what they think, but not for long now, and perhaps, even before they've washed my feet…” I’ve been trying to read closely. It’s hard to find something in ‘Ennemonde.’ I read this dialogue and stopped with shock as it reads like dialogue I would’ve written in ‘Lonely Life of an Art Angel.’ For character “they’ve washed my feet” feels like a strong moment for them, they’re so concerned with having their feet washed, and by “they” her family she’s created.

When I read of spring coming towards Ennemonde in a meteorological way it felt as if Giono was observing the real earth and placing Ennemonde amongst it. As a presence, not as a character, she just sits there. Not sure I like that.

A book reverent of the land and its people. Towards the end of the book, (I’m sure all the characters and trees live in him) Bicou is no doubt a perfect insert character of his youth at least: “Bicou associated with communities of cattle, birds, small mammals, reeds, and even minerals.”

Pretty boring in most things. The land isn’t described with specificity. Details are brought up but not described.

[Vansa · Rating 5 out of 5]

My father and I are huge Peter Mayle fans, and we travelled through Provence using his books practically as a guide. I picked up this book, set in the same region, to get a perspective from a Provencal writer about life in that golden sunlight. This couldn't be more different from Peter Mayle's accounts in the Provencal sun, peopled by quirky locals.
Giono's Provence is a difficult place to live in, with people's lives, and fortunes, driven entirely by weather conditions, where making it through the years is a struggle. Rivalries are never forgotten, and are passed on from one generation to another. In one particularly powerful paragraph, Giono writes that Sartre had no place here, only the language of the gun. Getting by is so hard, that it leaves no space in the human heart for kindness, or empathy, or even morality. There's some lyrical writing about the landscape, both its harshness and its beauty, but in Giono's Provence, a sunny day doesn't inspire you to paint, it inspires you to hunt.
I'm really glad I read this book, it's short, but thought-provoking. If I had known, however, that the quaint picturesque little towns of Uzes and Sault held such dark passions, I might have thought twice about visiting!!

[Steven Blaisdell · Rating 4 out of 5]

The ending pages bring this text together, not in the sense of wrapping up a story line but in an existential and emotional way. As other reviewers have noted, at times I completely lost interest in this book, despite passages of great, even transcendent writing but seeing it through was worth overcoming the impulse to chuck it. For someone weaned on 20th century American modernism, the authorial un-interest here in maintaining a 'gripping' narrative demands acceptance and persistence in the face of disinterest, which is a good thing as Ennemonde is clearly a post-modern ur-text deserving of that kind of designation. Don't bother if you can't adopt to narratives that don't genuflect to the reader; do bother if you're willing to jettison expectations and allow authorial agency.

[mwr · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5

Giono hits upon some very lovely turns of phrase ("Monsieur Sartre would not be of much use here; a shotgun, on the other hand, comes in handy in many situations," to describe the highland region of rural France, e.g.) but they're not frequent enough to carry the rest of this meandering and slightly charming story.

Still, I wonder if that talent is why I was so fond of his journal (Occupation Journal, also put out by Archipelago) -- one can just drop the phrase into the journal without needing the rest.

[Steven · Rating 5 out of 5]

Somewhat rare that one gets to read a book and say "I think I've found something that somehow instantly becomes one of my top ten favorite books." This work is such a lyrical, suprising thing. There are sentences, whole paragraphs, that just come off in one's hand. A kind of "Oh my, what am I reading." Of course, that's so vague it doesn't help anyone reading this review to describe what it is. To some degree, this is a book about a murder, but that would really be a banal, almost empty way to put it. It's a book about spaces and communities and people inhabiting them.

[Charlie Kruse · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a delightfully enigmatic book! Giono illustrates a complete world, where humans and nature commingle to create something strange and beautiful. Human death is treated with the same lightness of touch as a description of a leaf. Quietly powerful, really fantastic.

[Ron Morreale · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was my introduction to Giono. I expect to read much more. His ability to use description of place, mostly outdoors, to further plot is exceptional. He seems intent on defying stereotypes in character, bringing real life to fiction.

[Alicia m. · Rating 3 out of 5]

The ending annoyed me because it seemed completely dissimilar to the rest of the text. The beginning was captivating, but the lengthy descriptions of nature in the last “chapter” was hard to get into and inconsistent

[Rachel Kowal · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.32 stars

This did not feel like a French book. Is that why I liked it? I guess the trick is probably just not reading books about sad boys wandering around Paris.

[Thalia Andasol]

i’m sorry i was so bored 🥱

[Jack · Rating 5 out of 5]

I didn't get it at first but I feel like I do now. I loved it

[Emily · Rating 1 out of 5]

read for school

[Aaron Loring · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not at all what I thought it was going to be. The story of the woman who is the namesake of the book is barely in 1/3 of it. It has a way of getting distracted about the smallest details that are explained almost to the extent of being too thorough. It was simultaneously holistic and precise. I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy most of the rambles but there are stretches where it just made me antsy to be done. The parts where the story finally gets legs and gets told are extremely good. It was romantic and weirdly apathetic. Idk what the fuck goes on in France to make someone write something like this but it's some odd shit

[Laurent Szklarz]

pour de la belle plume, du pittoresque et du rural nostalgique