Into the Sun

In this vivid and prescient 1922 novel from Swiss author Ramuz (Great Fear on the Mountain), rapid climate change brings about societal breakdown. The days seem like they will last forever during one particularly hot August. Then news arrives that Earth is on a collision course with the sun. Thermostats strain in once bucolic countries where it soon becomes too hot to sleep, heavy traffic makes escape from the cities impossible, and bathers get burned beyond recognition. Soon the electricity fails and city squares empty out, villages split into small republics, and looting runs rampant (“Everything is ours; everything is allowed,” Ramuz writes in fluidly shifting first-person plural narration). In the small impressions and vignettes that make up the novel, a boy and girl on a desperate sojourn encounter survivors lurking in the woods, children parent themselves now that adults have ceased to bother, and a desperate office worker takes up arms. Near the end, a lone pilot, one of the last human survivors, finds himself grounded in a wasteland, where beauty is fleeting and disintegration a certainty. The crisp translation enhances the stark imagery and uncanny foresight. This is striking. (July)