The Serpent of Stars

By: Jean Giono

Published by Archipelago Books, 2004-05-01

“Giono has created his own private terrestrial domain, a mythical domain . . . It is a region over which the stars and planets course with throbbing pulsations. It is a land in which things happen to men as aeons ago they happened to the gods . . .”—Henry Miller
In The Serpent of Stars, the narrator encounters a potter’s family, whose way of life is slowly revealed to us. The novel culminates in a large gathering where a Shepherd’s Play—a creation myth including in its cast The River, The Man, and The Mountain—is enacted. This novel leaves the reader believing in the animals, the terrain of which they are part, in the people who tend to them in life.