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The Open Road
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.
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.
224 pages, Paperback
First published May 18, 1951
26 people are currently reading
846 people want to read
About the author
Jean Giono
334 books346 followersJean 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 48 reviews
December 9, 2021
My appreciation of Giono stems from the language of his novels. I was blown away by it in the first novel of his that I read, 'A King Alone'. This novel has a more straight forward structure than that work, but the two principal characters here, the Artist and the unnamed narrator, are just as complex as the tormented Langlois of 'A King Alone'. And it is the complexity of their relationship, compared to the easy living nature of the narrator, where the significance of the novel develops. It allows Giono to highlight that battle between our desire for freedom and our need for companionship. Our tendency to crave excitement while at the same time wanting simplicity. Couple it with Giono's writing and you get a really pretty novel. The turbulent conclusion, which reads like a trance, is wonderful. Solid four stars.
January 23, 2023
"I'm not cut out to be a winner."
A nameless vagabond wanders the wintry French Alpine countryside looking for odd jobs in 1950. The outer world rarely intrudes, but the Artist does, a fellow drifter with a hand for cheaty card tricks. Their relationship is distant, weird, and often violent as they traverse postwar France going from town to town looking for work and eying each other suspiciously.
Giono is a writer who is hard to pin down. His works are very different from one another and defy a universal label. This one is a classic "road" novel, not unlike its successor On the Road but somehow better because it's far less aware of itself. Giono's prose is steeped in vivid links with nature and weather, lending the whole dark affair a poetic hue that you'll notice only too late in some dramatic bits.
A nameless vagabond wanders the wintry French Alpine countryside looking for odd jobs in 1950. The outer world rarely intrudes, but the Artist does, a fellow drifter with a hand for cheaty card tricks. Their relationship is distant, weird, and often violent as they traverse postwar France going from town to town looking for work and eying each other suspiciously.
Giono is a writer who is hard to pin down. His works are very different from one another and defy a universal label. This one is a classic "road" novel, not unlike its successor On the Road but somehow better because it's far less aware of itself. Giono's prose is steeped in vivid links with nature and weather, lending the whole dark affair a poetic hue that you'll notice only too late in some dramatic bits.
October 13, 2021
Vivacious, insightful, caustic, and playful, the natural world spills from the pages of this vagabond novel of 1950s France in which two dissimilar characters, inversions of each other, embark on picaresque adventures over the stretch of one season’s autumn-to-spring, probing friendship, love, and meaning in a banal world.
July 23, 2022
funny I actually read this whilst stuck on a train going the wrong way, in the exact part of France the story is set in
September 16, 2020
Ambiguous, suspenseful and haunting. The Narrator, whose name is never disclosed, is a man in his forties or early fifties who picks up work here and there although he is educated and personable enough to have a steady job. He may be on the run from something since at the beginning he half expects to see his name in the newspaper. One day he meets a younger man with a guitar who hates work of any kind and only makes money by cheating at cards. Towards the end of the novel we learn that his name is Victor, but the N. refers to him as l'Artiste. Like everything in the relationship between the 2 men, this nickname is ambiguous. The N. bends over backwards to please and help Victor while being aware that the young man is a complete cad who will ditch him, betray him or even kill him as suits. At times the N. comes across as needy, at other times his concern for Victor seems fatherly. There is an obvious homoerotic undertone to their dealings, but the dynamic of the relationship is much more interesting than that. Much as he loves his freedom, at times the N. experiences acute feelings of loneliness and of longing for the sedentary life. The N. has casual sex with several of the ladies who take them in, but Victor only gets his kicks from cheating at cards and shuns all human contacts. One day inevitably he goes too far and is left for dead by people he has fleeced, but the N. rescues him and takes him to safety. However, Victor's hands remain permanently damaged, thereby putting an end to his life as a card sharp. Probably because he cannot bear this, Victor attempts to strangle a poor old woman who dies of shock after the attack. The villagers form a posse to catch him and imprison or possibly lynch him. The N. precedes them and with his superior instinct for anticipating Victor's actions finds him first and shoots him dead. In the last paragraph, he flippantly suggests that he will soon find another Victor. The story takes place over the course of a winter described with a a kind of heightened realism. Bad weather of every imaginable description assails the vagrants, at times turning their confrontation into a huis-clos in the great outdoors. Both men are misfits who could find some sort of redemption in friendship, but such is life that this consolation is denied them, unless perhaps at the moment the N. shoots Victor to protect him from a worse fate.
August 16, 2018
Loved it. Read for yourself.
November 18, 2021
It finally happened – a NYRB release that I wouldn’t suggest to anyone. There will be spoilers here. Our narrator is a drifter who works when needed and demonstrates a variety of skills but never seems to stick around long. He’s a keen observer of life and how it’s lived but besides his moral ambiguity – there’s not much of interest here. He travels the French countryside, at times with “the Artist” who is a card sharp with a guitar and a few riffs. Although there’s no overt homo-eroticism – and at times I wish there was – because that would have been more exciting than another trip up and down the hills at least – it is implied in the love/hate relationship they share. The book offers an attempt at climax at the end where the narrator throws in some violence and references to prison rape – like how Proust uses an anal sex reference to give readers a taste of the visceral after many pages of head-in-the-clouds contemplation. Difference here is – Proust is one of the best prose writers the world has known, and any fairly intelligent reader will be amazed at his depth of thought and Giono is merely good or banausic most of the time and sometimes quite bad. There are no long and winding sentences here – just amateurish, perhaps intentionally crude bursts of thoughts that sometimes offer a refreshing diversion from the plot to reveal our narrator’s less than typical views of morality. By the end I wanted to simply set it down and stop – it became a chore despite its relative simplicity. You know how it ends – it could only end that way – think Of Mice and Men. But in this book – Lenny is a deplorable crook and George doesn’t really seem to give much of a shit about anything other than his beard. Maybe in its time – there might have been some small shock value – almost how like Zweig points a beckoning finger to casual readers in the train stations that don’t have the nerve to go in for some more intense debauchery. NYRB books are a joy to me – even if the reading is less than ideal – the books are presented so wonderfully – with well chosen art. This one is presented with a cover that is simply a playing card…and there’s part of me that figures the designer read this – and the simple image was fueled by the same creative fire that the text provided.
November 10, 2021
There's a genre of books (or a subgenre, really) about people walking, usually with little means, where tales of vagabondry are interspersed with deep observations about beauty, nature, and humanity. The Open Road joins two of these, by Laurie Lee and Jack London respectively, as my favourite examples.
This book is a delight. It's a pleasure to read. You feel like you're walking alongside the narrator, even though he remains anonymous throughout. His account has a nice lilt and a gentle bounce that read like the steps he's taking through the rural France of the 1950s.
There are pure moments, like a conversation beside the stove in a pub kitchen or a casual inventory of tree types along a forest path. There are pockets of mundane conversation to bring life to the journey. The episodic, picaresque structure keep things fresh and interesting without the need for chapters or distinct sections.
And amongst it all there's tension, most often centred around 'The Artist' and the creeping sense that the narrator's naivety is leading him into trouble. Then, there's an equally strong question of whether the narrator has omitted certain details about events and situations, perhaps disguising aspects of his actions or intent. This ambiguity leaves a feeling of wondering whether you've missed something somewhere, which itself leads to wondering whether you're overthinking things.
It's a deft achievement: along with the lilting pace and gentle bounce, these feelings are something shared between the reader and someone making their improvised way through the world with little more than the shoes on their feet and the clothes on their back.
This book is a delight. It's a pleasure to read. You feel like you're walking alongside the narrator, even though he remains anonymous throughout. His account has a nice lilt and a gentle bounce that read like the steps he's taking through the rural France of the 1950s.
There are pure moments, like a conversation beside the stove in a pub kitchen or a casual inventory of tree types along a forest path. There are pockets of mundane conversation to bring life to the journey. The episodic, picaresque structure keep things fresh and interesting without the need for chapters or distinct sections.
And amongst it all there's tension, most often centred around 'The Artist' and the creeping sense that the narrator's naivety is leading him into trouble. Then, there's an equally strong question of whether the narrator has omitted certain details about events and situations, perhaps disguising aspects of his actions or intent. This ambiguity leaves a feeling of wondering whether you've missed something somewhere, which itself leads to wondering whether you're overthinking things.
It's a deft achievement: along with the lilting pace and gentle bounce, these feelings are something shared between the reader and someone making their improvised way through the world with little more than the shoes on their feet and the clothes on their back.
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March 13, 2022A melancholic vagabond befriends a self-destructive con artist in a bitter rural French winter. There is an element of menace to everything that Giano wrote, some intrinsic understanding of the nebulous membrane between beauty and death, love and hate. I enjoyed the hell out of this one.
October 20, 2024
The sun is never so beautiful as on the day when you take the open road
November 6, 2021
The Open Road is laid out in a single unbroken chapter, which I didn't think much of until the very end of the book. At first I believed it to be a simple parallel between the title and the thematic content of the book. When finished it felt, very briefly, like I had finally reached the end of a lengthy, but charming opening act. An opening act that rang with an evening's worth of finality.
The main character is full of breezy, Whitmanesque sayings that constantly make recourse to two different forms of motion: cycles and infinities. The cycles carry different durations (such as the main character's relationship to his beard), and the infinites (ideally) just carry one forth. The main characters may enter into an infinity when it's time to do so, or when it's untimely. Infinity is blocked or let loose, whereas the cycles arrive too soon, too late, too much, too little, even right on time. But when a mark of a cycle arrives (such as the spring rains), it necessarily interacts with the infinities: kicking one into gear (time to get going) or causing a pause (now here's the place!)
The road itself doesn't end, like all infinities we just enter and leave its constant stream, but reaching the end of the novel-chapter made me think about the end of the road, The Road. Life itself may be one infinity among many, and any one life can only enter and leave once, stopping both cycles and almost all infinities. I'll take that pipe and some table wine now thanks!
The main character is full of breezy, Whitmanesque sayings that constantly make recourse to two different forms of motion: cycles and infinities. The cycles carry different durations (such as the main character's relationship to his beard), and the infinites (ideally) just carry one forth. The main characters may enter into an infinity when it's time to do so, or when it's untimely. Infinity is blocked or let loose, whereas the cycles arrive too soon, too late, too much, too little, even right on time. But when a mark of a cycle arrives (such as the spring rains), it necessarily interacts with the infinities: kicking one into gear (time to get going) or causing a pause (now here's the place!)
The road itself doesn't end, like all infinities we just enter and leave its constant stream, but reaching the end of the novel-chapter made me think about the end of the road, The Road. Life itself may be one infinity among many, and any one life can only enter and leave once, stopping both cycles and almost all infinities. I'll take that pipe and some table wine now thanks!
May 12, 2024
Jean Giono's The Open Road is like the French equivalent of Jack Kerouac's road novels, with uniquely French touches that make it even more interesting. (Also, it predates the Kerouac novel by half a decade.)
Two men who wander the French countryside between Province and the Alps develop a close and yet jarring relationship. The unnamed narrator takes odd jobs in the countryside and has some talent. His friend, Victor André, is a gambler and card sharp, which leads him down a darker road.
Their friendship is one of the strangest friendships in all of fiction and leads to an unforeseen ending. I have read three or four books by Giono to date and consider him one of the greatest French postwar novelists.
Two men who wander the French countryside between Province and the Alps develop a close and yet jarring relationship. The unnamed narrator takes odd jobs in the countryside and has some talent. His friend, Victor André, is a gambler and card sharp, which leads him down a darker road.
Their friendship is one of the strangest friendships in all of fiction and leads to an unforeseen ending. I have read three or four books by Giono to date and consider him one of the greatest French postwar novelists.
March 17, 2025
This took ridiculously long to finish. For some reason I’ve found it difficult to read much this past week. The book is good although it tested my patience. Normally this plain, affectless prose style is like catnip for me. But the story here is just too obscure to support the writing. The aphoristic quality of the narrator’s musings are also clipped and at times annoying to parse (though this seemed like an issue of translation). There are moments of terrific momentum and vivid, elliptical prose, but ultimately they feel too disconnected and incidental to read as much more than writing exercises. Perhaps I would have liked this much more if I read it over a couple of days, rather than a belaboured two weeks.
August 1, 2022
Our narrator is just as comfortable expressing the joy of mountains flowers as he is bashing in heads in a bar fight. His narration reveals the varieties of unspoken social dynamics with an ethos that is accessible but likely unshared by most of us in the modern world and for that, this is an extraordinary work. Our first person narrator suffers no delusions, no illusions. His pragmatism reflects the myriad of ways he (one) can be honest with him-(one's) self and it's not always neat, doesn't always make sense; his voice and philosophy is clear, strong, and haunting. The writing is gorgeous without being at all showy.
The internal battle/reflection on pages 94-95 blew my mind.
The internal battle/reflection on pages 94-95 blew my mind.
April 2, 2025
I’ve sat on the review for this book for over a week and every single day I’ve loved it more and more and more. I love the style, the main character, the stream of consciousness, the imagery, the dialogue…
Everything is just pure, and I love that I can be transported to another time where I don’t realize I’m reading a book until it’s over and I have to stop.
Easy 5 stars and I’m surprised it isn’t more popular.
Everything is just pure, and I love that I can be transported to another time where I don’t realize I’m reading a book until it’s over and I have to stop.
Easy 5 stars and I’m surprised it isn’t more popular.
November 12, 2021
I really enjoyed the prose and descriptive language. But this was pretty nonsensical plot-wise, and I'm not sure if it is because of translation.
January 7, 2022
Un autre livre de français (yay !)
3.7/4
La fin était plutôt pas mal
Je mettrais jamais 4 parce que y'avait trop de descriptions de salies à mon goût...
3.7/4
La fin était plutôt pas mal
Je mettrais jamais 4 parce que y'avait trop de descriptions de salies à mon goût...
May 6, 2022
The Open Road, written by the French author Jean Giono in 1950, is in many ways a classical “on the road” tale. The main characters, friends of a sort, are the unnamed narrator and his traveling companion, “the artist”. The setting is France, between northern Provence and the Alps, and the wandering is done either on foot, or the occasional borrowed truck. The mountains and villages our two comrades wander through are not only timeless, but apparently unscathed by the war just having ended.
The artist runs into a spot of difficulty with some of the locals, and ends up with his hands mangled. But the narrator basically shrugs this off, and they continue on regardless. They settle for a time, here and there, and there are odd jobs for the narrator, and the seasons change, and there are also other temporary friends as they go along, but the urge to move on comes on, and they are off.
It’s a rather dreamy, drifting tale, with nowhere in particular to go, but it made me rather want to tag along. Here’s a taste.
As a series of powerful thunderstorms roll through, the narrator makes his way to the local village’s bistro for the evening. We have a quick bite to eat, even if we are not very interested in the food. What does interest us is the crowd: the people coming in and going out in time with claps of thunder and bolts of lightning. You can hear the din of the warm rain pounding on the roofs, in the downspouts, against the windows. It’s hammering the panes so hard, you’re afraid they’ll burst.
The bistro isn’t getting any less crowded. There are guys here I’ve never seen before. They must have stayed close to their home fires until now. Each one comes in, opens his change purse, buys himself an anise or two, and stares at his glass like it was the Messiah.
The artist runs into a spot of difficulty with some of the locals, and ends up with his hands mangled. But the narrator basically shrugs this off, and they continue on regardless. They settle for a time, here and there, and there are odd jobs for the narrator, and the seasons change, and there are also other temporary friends as they go along, but the urge to move on comes on, and they are off.
It’s a rather dreamy, drifting tale, with nowhere in particular to go, but it made me rather want to tag along. Here’s a taste.
As a series of powerful thunderstorms roll through, the narrator makes his way to the local village’s bistro for the evening. We have a quick bite to eat, even if we are not very interested in the food. What does interest us is the crowd: the people coming in and going out in time with claps of thunder and bolts of lightning. You can hear the din of the warm rain pounding on the roofs, in the downspouts, against the windows. It’s hammering the panes so hard, you’re afraid they’ll burst.
The bistro isn’t getting any less crowded. There are guys here I’ve never seen before. They must have stayed close to their home fires until now. Each one comes in, opens his change purse, buys himself an anise or two, and stares at his glass like it was the Messiah.
November 12, 2024
"I ask if you get anywhere by carrying on from here. She answers in a tone that indicates, precisely, that the world exists anywhere else but here. According to her, you only have to leave this place to arrive in the promised land. That’s one way of looking at it, I guess.
Her coffee is good."
8.5 / 10
A tough one to describe, featuring a whole bunch of contradictions, but it's just so delightful. There's a very strange lightness to the entire thing that makes it breeze by, but it never feels insubstantial. There's an evenness to the tone and storytelling that could come across as wheels spinning in place, but that particular tone is so enjoyable that it felt like this could have gone on for hundreds of pages more and I would have been thrilled with all of them. It has a generally cheery feel to the whole thing despite featuring bleak event after bleak event. Giono is a remarkable writer, and carries us along across so much within 200 pages without losing that remarkably light sense of pacing. This has to be an all-time favourite ending as well, what a fantastic final few pages. Immediately ordering more Giono books.
Her coffee is good."
8.5 / 10
A tough one to describe, featuring a whole bunch of contradictions, but it's just so delightful. There's a very strange lightness to the entire thing that makes it breeze by, but it never feels insubstantial. There's an evenness to the tone and storytelling that could come across as wheels spinning in place, but that particular tone is so enjoyable that it felt like this could have gone on for hundreds of pages more and I would have been thrilled with all of them. It has a generally cheery feel to the whole thing despite featuring bleak event after bleak event. Giono is a remarkable writer, and carries us along across so much within 200 pages without losing that remarkably light sense of pacing. This has to be an all-time favourite ending as well, what a fantastic final few pages. Immediately ordering more Giono books.
November 1, 2025
3.5
"i'm going nowhere. neither is he. we're spinning nonstop in a bitter bowl made of earth, junipers, boxwoods, and everything we've done, and we're doing it over and over, endlessly, with an irresistible urge to sleep. / and i fall asleep on my feet, leaning against a sapling. it's not so much the sunlight that wakes me up as it is his gaze: fixed on me. days of love are better than nights of love. he doesn't move while i prepare myself. i fire my two shots full in his face. i see them hit their mark. / friendship is beautiful!"
pretty good. nowhere near as good but sort of the movie scarecrow if it was a french book written just before the beat era. so it also resembles on the road a little too. guy is also in his pipe era so i could relate. came to this from pagnol but i forget the connection besides the region.
"i'm going nowhere. neither is he. we're spinning nonstop in a bitter bowl made of earth, junipers, boxwoods, and everything we've done, and we're doing it over and over, endlessly, with an irresistible urge to sleep. / and i fall asleep on my feet, leaning against a sapling. it's not so much the sunlight that wakes me up as it is his gaze: fixed on me. days of love are better than nights of love. he doesn't move while i prepare myself. i fire my two shots full in his face. i see them hit their mark. / friendship is beautiful!"
pretty good. nowhere near as good but sort of the movie scarecrow if it was a french book written just before the beat era. so it also resembles on the road a little too. guy is also in his pipe era so i could relate. came to this from pagnol but i forget the connection besides the region.
December 3, 2022
Ce roman se déroule - comme souvent chez Giono - dans l'arrière-pays provençal. Le personnage principal, un homme sans attache, parcourt le pays, travaille quand c'est nécessaire et quitte l'endroit quand il en a assez. Sur son chemin, il rencontre un autre homme, singulier, qu'il surnomme l'artiste. Ils se lient et font un bout de route ensemble... Comme toujours, l'histoire est assez simple, mais les personnages sont d'une grande beauté et le récit plein de poésie bien qu'étant ancré dans le réel et l'essence des choses.
August 9, 2024
This is the best book I have read so far this year! I can’t believe I’ve lived this long without knowing Jean Giono. Open Road is the picture of a content man in the simplest of settings. He forms a relationship with a man who is his exact opposite, and the journey they take together exposes a struggle every individual faces.
I wish I had read this book before I was introduced to Camus. Giono has such a human appeal to his protagonist. I’ll probably revisit this novel again before the year is over.
I wish I had read this book before I was introduced to Camus. Giono has such a human appeal to his protagonist. I’ll probably revisit this novel again before the year is over.
October 16, 2021
3.5 stars
Interesting exploration of transient relationships, masculinity, connection.
The best thing about this novel is the vagabond’s voice, and fortunately, it came through well in translation.
The ending was superb, but overall, it was not entirely to my taste. I think fans of Salinger and Kerouac would enjoy this book more than I did.
Interesting exploration of transient relationships, masculinity, connection.
The best thing about this novel is the vagabond’s voice, and fortunately, it came through well in translation.
The ending was superb, but overall, it was not entirely to my taste. I think fans of Salinger and Kerouac would enjoy this book more than I did.
Read
January 2, 2022continuing on my unique journey of enjoying each book i read by an author less than the one before it. melville was a masterpiece, hill felt like an a24 fever dream. i suppose this one is better than whatever one i read last fall. not a fan of the aimless provencial picture he paints, i guess. hopefully nyrb is sitting on some more of the good, weird stuff
January 9, 2022
not a typical road story but captures story of a man in the 1950s traveling around rural France noticing nature and people. Hard worker who befriends 'the artist' who is a guitar playing card shark. They go along together for some time until some small town mishaps necessitates departure. Existential.
December 18, 2024
She says she likes my beard, that she likes my clean shaven face, that my friend isn’t too trustworthy, and that none of us are neither, but if this isn’t a good place to stop, where should we start going? And I sigh though it could be a smile.
Read
October 19, 2021some passages in here that will stick with me, but holistically i don’t know
November 29, 2021
Gooooshh
Read
December 3, 2021holy shit
February 3, 2022
Giono's a pagan saint.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 48 reviews