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blackbird27's review
4.0
Resuming my reading list after an unplanned two-month break means I've got a lot of catching up to do. This short 1917 novel by Swiss social satirist C.-F. Ramuz was a poker-faced delight, maintaining the fantastic conceit of its premise -- the Devil comes to a small Swiss village, and makes it Hell -- with as patient a parody of pastoral naturalism as I've seen. I cheated myself a bit, because I left off reading months ago, just before the third-act resolution, so the impact of the ending was muted for me, but as an entry in my running tally of great forgotten 1910s novels, it deserves rediscovery.
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