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wept for the farm where there were no children.’ For what woman would marry a peasant farmer, these days? Marry toil that remains ceaseless and an isolation that increases in direct relation to mechanisation, as farming requires fewer and fewer workers? In the old days, the whole village turned out to help with the hay harvest. In summer, everybody adjourned to the high pastures, to graze the cows. What used to be celebrations are now lonely chores. ‘In the Time of the Cosmonauts’ puts this very graphically: ‘A number of years ago when the Russian, Gagarin, the first man in space, was circling the earth, every one of the twenty scattered chalets at Peniel housed, each summer, cattle and women and men. So many cattle that there was only just enough grass to go round.’ Twenty-five years later, only an old man and a girl are there, and ‘there was so much grass they could let their animals graze night and day’.
    As it happens, this girl, Danielle, might have married a peasant farmer, if one had asked her. But the mountains, in the concrete person of the old man, filthy, almost demonic, almost heroic, offer themselves to her in such a primitive and atavistic manner that, terrified, she runs away.
    Even so, little that is primitive and atavistic remains in these upland farms, where now the mating season heralds the visit to the eager cows not of the bull but of the inseminator. The most primitive and atavistic thing in the mountains is a man-made horror, the manganese plant in the title story, ‘Once in Europa’.
    A small family farm, home of the woman who tells the story, is flung down like a gauntlet in the face of insensate industrialisation; the plant surrounds it. The plants kill her lover; it hascrippled the man whom she later marries. During the course of her life, its noxious fumes lay waste to the valley in which she lives.
    Yet there is an infernal grandeur about the manganese plant and the devastation it wreaks. Only nature itself could be more destructive. Can’t one bolt of lightning kill a whole flock of sheep? There is no such grandeur about the slow erosion of the farming communities as they are encroached upon by the banality which is our century’s particular gift to civilisation. In ‘Boris is Buying Horses’, a woman seduces a farmer in order to gain possession of his house, which she and her husband proceed to run as a souvenir shop. This is a glimpse of a future in which the Alps have become a giant theme park.
    Once in Europa
is about history at work in daily life. This is the second volume of Berger’s projected trilogy about twentieth-century peasant life, which has the general title
Into Their Labours
. It is Berger’s genius – and I don’t use the word lightly – to reveal to us how the process of history affects people we come to know as friends, so that we suffer with them, grieve for them, hope for them, realise that we, too, are part of the same process.
    The final story in the book, ‘Play Something For Me’, takes a young farmer on a day trip to Venice, where he makes love to a shop assistant during a
festa de l’unita
, which is a good urban substitute for a village festival. She urges him to leave his cows and come and work in the oil refineries at Mestri. Perhaps he will. Like the eponymous accordion player of the first story, he is a music maker. ‘The accordion was made for life on this earth, the left hand marking the bass and the heart-beats, the arms and shoulders labouring to make breath, and the right hand fingering for hopes!’ These are not pessimistic stories, although often they will make you cry.
    (1989)

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The German Legends of the Brothers Grimm
    Unlike the Grimms’ collection of fairytales, without which no home is complete, their collection of German legends has never been translated into English before. What is the difference between a