After the Landslide

WHEN THE MOUNTAIN FELL (221pp.)—Charles Ferdinand Ramuz, translated by Sarah Fisher Scoff—Pantheon ($2.50).

The Book-of-the-Month Club advertises meritorious and meretricious books in the same loud tone of voice. To the club’s 900,000 members, judgments like “powerful,” “moving,” “noble,” “haunting” must by now have the same dull ring as “colossal” has for moviegoers. When the Mountain Fell, the club’s co-choice for October, is promoted with all these words. But for the first time in many a month, they are not entirely irrelevant.

Readers who are accustomed to febrile, jerky best-sellers will find When the Mountain Fell a strange dish. So will those whose sense of style has been numbed by those same bestsellers. When the Mountain Fell is the artfully simple story of what happened when a landslide wiped out a herders’ settlement in the Swiss Alps 200 years ago. Far below in the village of Aire, the roar was heard in the middle of a clear June night. Next morning, the lovely, cattle-dotted valley of Derborence was choked with the 150,000,000 cubic feet of rock that had loomed over the region as the Devil’s Tower. In Aire nearly every house had lost a husband, son or brother. Thérèse, who was pregnant, had lost her young husband Antoine, and her uncle Seraphin, with whom he shared a hut.

The Tone of Legend. Seven weeks later a wasted, ghostly figure crept down the mountainside to Aire. It was Antoine, who had incredibly survived because the rear wall of his cabin had been the cliff itself. Dazed and half-starved, he spends only one night at home, returns the next morning determined to find Seraphin, whose voice he had heard after the landslide. When the superstitious mountain men refuse to go with him, he crazily attacks the boulder-strewn waste with pick and shovel, is brought back to sanity only by the courage and understanding of his wife who has followed him up the mountainside.

When the Mountain Fell is largely a triumph of perfected style. Its legend-like tone and natural, village-talk dialogue give it a quality of universality, keep it, in spite of place names and details of locale, from becoming merely a Swiss regional tale. It poses no “problems” except basic human ones which turn on love, fear, faith, generosity and loyalty. U.S. readers will get here what few other recent books have given them—a genuine literary experience.

The Author. A French edition of When the Mountain Fell, published in the U.S. in 1936, was the first selection of the French Book-of-the-Month Club. This is its first publication in English. Its author, Charles Ferdinand Ramuz, was born in the small town of Cully on Lake Geneva. He lived and wrote in Paris from 1902 to 1914. The eight novels, four books of verse and two collections of short stories he wrote in those years pleased only a small group of admirers. Ramuz returned to his native canton of Vaud. shook off Parisian literary influences and identified himself in his work with peasants, small craftsmen and woodchoppers. As a result, the French critics who had ignored him as a Left-Banker in Paris began to praise him extravagantly, tried without success to get Ramuz admitted to the French Academy’s “Immortals.” When Ramuz died last spring at 69, the Swiss Government declared a national day of mourning.