Description:
A rockfall buries an Alpine valley; a man returns from the mountain; Swiss peasant tragedy; love against the landscape; the Derborence disaster; Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz
Brief description: Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz (1878-1947) was a French-language Swiss novelist and poet, born in Lausanne, in the canton of Vaud. Writing in a distinctive, incantatory prose rooted in the landscape and peasantry of French-speaking Switzerland, he became the central figure of Suisse romande literature; his portrait later appeared on the Swiss 200-franc banknote, and his Histoire du soldat (1918) was written in collaboration with Igor Stravinsky. Skomlin publishes six of his novels in English translation: Beauty on Earth, The Reign of the Evil One, Riversong of the Rhone, What if the sun..., Derborence, and Farinet's Gold.