Word: giono
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...dozens of friends. It was to be a celebration of his life and relationships, bonds he'd formed, not easily, over many years with many people. That he was dying was inescapable, though. Pretending otherwise, when he never did, would have been inappropriate. I chose to read from Jean Giono's The Man Who Planted Trees and The Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuscinski, the Polish journalist and author who was for decades the sole third-world correspondent for a Polish news agency. As it happened, I read too long from the former and had to forego the latter...
...Wilson Brandao Giono, a Panamanian painter and sculptor, came to New York City in 1978 following his German girlfriend (now his wife) and, he says, "ran out of money. I was nervous and ready to go back three times; once I even had my suitcase packed. Eventually I found a job as a dishwasher." He began to sell a few art works. One, a geometric illustration of a woman, was chosen as the cover for a New York Spanish telephone directory. He still works two to three days a week as a carpenter and elevator operator but has exhibited paintings...
...Straw Man, by Jean Giono. All the world's a stage, and all men either players or played upon, in this operatic tale of revolt in 19th century Italy...
...earlier Giono novel, The Horseman on the Roof (TIME, Feb. 1, 1954), showed how young Angelo had lived through a cholera epidemic and learned how theatrically men often behave in the face of death. What he still does not know, for all his experience, is that he is the hand-picked tool of some shrewd leftist Italian conspirators-political stage managers who are using him to inspire and excite the crowd. To the conspirators, Angelo is a mere straw man whose ultimate "destiny is to be burned. "All that is asked of him," says a plump rebel plotter named...
...Author Giono's theme is as complicated as it is fascinating. Most of the characters think they are acting like real people, but they are in fact propelled by theatrical impulses, and are acting out a glamorous melodrama entitled "Liberty"; as a result, it is often impossible for the reader to know what is actually happening. Nor does Author Giono try much to clarify this Pirandelloesque confusion, which he obviously regards as a principal factor of human life-fantastic but unresolvable. Impossible to plumb in small details, The Straw Man, with its superbly painted backdrops of Italian cities...