Jean Giono is considered one of France’s greatest
writers. His mastery of narrative description
is remarkable. If the topic is beauty,
valor or honor, the reader is sure to be enthralled. There is a downside to
this skill however, and it is on shocking display in Giono’s classic The Horseman
on the Roof: the story is set in the southeast of France during a cholera
outbreak. The visual of the narrative is
ghastly, page after page of real life and death brought to your eyes and nose. That said, it is a compelling read.
The story is about a young Italian man named Angelo Pardi. He is a
cavalry officer and a gentleman, son of nobility, elitist, yet fighter for
revolution. There is a lot of contradiction
in that sentence, which makes Angelo an interesting character. He has had to flee to France where he works to
organize other exiles and let them know they’ve been sold out by the latest
alliance change among Europe’s endlessly warring states. It is France’s post-Napoleon era.
Angelo's flight to France soon becomes a nightmare as the cholera epidemic begins to spread from person to person, village to village. The horror of the epidemic, with people trying to survive, and turning on each other, blockades at city gates, and mandatory communal quarantines of out-of-towners – is impeding Angelo’s work. At one point, to avoid capture he ends up crawling on the tiled rooftops of a village – hence the title of the book. In his escapades, he meets a young French noblewoman, who herself is trying to survive. They will travel together, ever eastward trying to stay one step ahead of both the epidemic, and the French military.
In 1995, a movie based on book was released starring Olivier Martinez as Angelo, and Juliette Binoche as Pauline, the noblewoman. It is largely faithful to the script – which makes
its cholera scenes a bit much. I prejudged
the movie assuming it would be your typical “beautiful people” among the world’s
ugliness re-write. I was wrong on that
front. There are many political asides in the book that
are lost on readers without a background in French history (like me). The movie
does a fairly good job of explaining this history for an international
audience.
Recommended. Yes, both book and movie. Though, not for the squeamish.
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