Joy of Man's Desiring: A Novel

Rereading this wonderful classic. Consider it poetry. A beautifully written narrative that gives the gift of seeing beauty and wonder in the every day. I will be ordering some for gifts

Slow read! I like fast paced books and this is not one!

In Jean Giono’s novel JOY OF MAN’S DESIRING, Jourdan and Marthe are a middle-aged couple in rural France in the early twentieth century in a marriage that has lost most of its fire. They meet a very strange stranger Bobi who becomes an important part of their lives. The author peoples his novel with a host of other characters: Honore, Carle, Aurore, Honorine, Zulma, Jacquou, Randoulet, Josephine et al. (The poet Billy Collins would probably not read this book since he has stated that he prefers novels with just a few characters.)The novel celebrates the beauty and joy of pastoral life. These characters walk through fields of narcissi, they find does for a magnificent stag—the author gets inside his head making him practically become human—they plant crops and then harvest them. They look often to the sky that the author can describe in fifty different ways. He got my attention by page 12 with his comparison of Orion to Queen Ann’s lace, a recurring metaphor in this novel of over 450 pages with delightful imagery on practically every page. Wild geese fly as if they are “nailed to the sky like some new daytime constellation of great pure stars.” The sky has “flowering branches.” The clouds are “daisy-colored.” “The sky looked like a field of violets.” The night “lapped gently.” The stars were “like fish spawn.” There are “pearl-colored” evenings. The list seems endless.The characters—usually Jourdan and Bobi—spent much time discussing and trying to define joy. (According to the book blurb, the original title literally in French is “that my joy remain.”) “Youth is joy.” It may be above the earthly roads like a rainbow, ”that we don’t see it because we are badly placed.” “A solitary joy and we have patience.” “The joys of the world are our sole nourishment. The least little drop keeps us alive.” “Life is joy.” We are all looking for joy. Finding it is difficult. And Bobi concludes in this in many ways an amazing novel (though I confess I’m not sure what it is all about) as follows, intertwining joy, hope and love: “If there were no joy, there would be no world. It isn’t true that there is no joy. When you say there is no joy, you lose hope. You must not lose hope. You must remember that hope itself is joy. The hope that it will happen soon, that it will happen tomorrow, that it is going to happen, that it is here, that it is touching you, that it awaits you, that it is swelling, that suddenly it is going to burst, that it is going to flow into your mouth, that it is going to make you drink, that you will no longer be thirsty, that you will have no more pain, that you will love.’"JOY OF MAN’S DESIRING is sometimes difficult but in the end worth the effort.

I am so glad to see that this is in print again. I've read and re-read JOY for some 40 years, and each reading is a powerful dip into a reeling, mesmerising world of ancient characters, almost legendary, and ancient unforgiving landscapes. Magic, surreal, loving, harsh, hallucinatory. The language is a delight --- the characters speak in words you wish we were godlike enough to use every day. Archetypes of life, how life could be or should be lived, in tune with nature. But do not for one instant think that this is some "hippie" haven or vision. Here on the high hills, lust and life and death are inexorable. Giono himself was a difficult, disturbing, even dangerous man, a blood-and-soil primitive with a shrewd modern mind.Yes, of course Henry Miller loved Giono! I think we love Giono for saying what we wish we could say. We all wish we could dare to be locked onto that high plateau, to live that rural workday, under unforgiving weather. See, just the memory of reading it has uncoupled my words and senetnces. Read it.

Excellent novel. My native language is french, thus I first read it in french (Que ma joie demeure). I was astonished by the magic of Giono's book, his words are precious.I though this novel would be impossible to translate in english, and I was wrong. Great, great job by the translater, even though I think it's impossible to grasp all the subtilities.

The most stirring exploration of man and of the world that I know. Jean Giono writes with an incredibly full voice that speaks of the earth and of the wealth of its incarnations which he ceaselessly likens to other aspects of nature in a web of interrelatedness with such poetic grace that one cannot help but cry Yes! as one reads them. When it comes to men and women, there is on the part of the voice which guides us an intensely compassionate respect for the ambiguous forces which, as we are reminded again and again as we read these pages, permeate and animate us.At times the translation reads a bit awkwardly in comparison with the original French, but that's alright. The feelings at which Giono aims are universally felt no matter the particularities of language. These clumsy words of mine, though, are for naught; the only homage that one can do to Giono is to read him, again and again, to keep open the sluices of the soul, to say to oneself, "He will come back. I am sure of it. I am sure of it."

Jean Giono french novelist from Provence;father a cobbler. His work falls into two main sections;the pre-war novels (the best) and the post-war romances.This novel is from the former period and is rightly considered his masterpiece.It is a mysterious,ambiguous,lyrical account of the lives of simple folk, a story that must be told.In Bobi, the con-man saviour, Giono found a perfect surrogate for himself and his pastoral project.This book is alive with an epic sense of people living under the spell of and living in accordance with, the laws of nature. Bobi arrives in a small country community and through his prophetic homolies, distilations of the genuinely important aspects of daily life around them, brings forth their spiritual awakening .Seasons, and the changes wrought are exquisitly rendered in prose of great beauty.The act of eating with friends is described as an almost religious ritual, of communal empathy and staggering enlightenment. This is a book that will bind you in its own magic circle of seasonal change and renewal. Highly recommended.

this book teachs me how to appreciate the things in my life , I do not need money to feel the breeze on my cheeks, I do not need money to watch the birds in the sky , I need only my feeling .

lovely book perhaps a little drawn out