/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.11063330]

Hi /lit/
I'm yearning for a feeling I can't quite describe. I want novels about mudane country/small town life, like tending to a farm, being a craftsman, that calm feeling of slight boredom, going with the seasons.
The kinds of feelings Kiki's delivery service and Whisper of the Heart (bests miyazaki btw) evoke so well.
Please, /lit/ have you got anything other than Thoreau to recommend ?

[Anonymous No.11063338]

Stanislaw Reymont - The Peasants
It's a book in four parts, each describing a season in the life of a small Polish village at the turn of the 1800s. Overall, it tells the story of a single year, how they go to the market, how they marry, what they do in the forest, and so on.

[Anonymous No.11063369]

[Anonymous No.11063373]

I’ve never kept flocks,
But it’s like I’ve kept them.
My soul is like a shepherd,
It knows the wind and the sun
And it walks hand in hand with the Seasons,
Following and seeing.
All the peace of Nature without people
Comes and sits at my side.
But I get sad
As the sunset is in our imagination
When it gets cold down in the plain
And you feel night coming in
Like a butterfly through the window.

But my sadness is quiet
Because it’s natural and it’s just
And it’s what should be in my soul
When it already thinks it exists
And my hands pick flowers
And my soul doesn’t know it.

Like the sound of cowbells
Beyond the curve of the road,
All my thoughts are peaceful.
I’m just sorry about knowing they’re peaceful,
Because if I didn’t know it,
Instead of them being peaceful and sad,
They’d be happy and peaceful.

Thinking makes you uncomfortable like walking in the rain
When the wind gets stronger and it seems to rain more.

I don’t have ambitions or desires.
Being a poet isn’t my ambition,
It’s my way of being alone.

And sometimes if I want
To imagine I’m a lamb
(Or a whole flock
Spreading out all over the hillside
So I can be a lot of happy things at the same time),
It’s only because I feel what I write at sunset,
Or when a cloud passes its hand over the light
And silence runs over the grass outside.
When I sit and write poems
Or, walking along the roads or pathways,
I write poems on the paper in my thoughts,
I feel a staff in my hand
And see my silhouette
On top of a knoll,
Looking after my flock and seeing my ideas,
Or looking after my ideas and seeing my flock,
With a silly smile like someone who doesn’t understand what somebody’s saying
But tries to pretend they do.

I greet everyone who reads me,
I tip my wide hat to them
When they see me at my door
Just as the stagecoach comes to the top of my hill.
I greet them and wish them sunshine,
Or rain, when rain is needed,
And that their houses have
A favorite chair
Where they sit reading my poems
By an open window.
And when they read my poems, I hope they think
I’m something natural —
An ancient tree, for instance,
Where they sat down with a thump
In the shade when they were kids
Tired from playing, and wiped the sweat
From their hot brows
With the sleeve of their striped cotton smock.

[Anonymous No.11063381]

From my village I see as much in the Universe as you can see from earth...
So my village is as big as any other land
Because I’m the size of what I see,
Not the size of my height...

In the cities life is smaller
Than here in my house on top of this hill.
In the city the big houses shut your sight with a key,
Hide the horizon, push your eyes far away from all the sky,
Make us smaller because they take away what our eyes can give us,
And make us poor because our only wealth is seeing.

[Anonymous No.11063391]

>>11063338
Thank you Anons, I will check those out
>>11063373
Thank you for the Pessoà

[Anonymous No.11063414]

Independent People by Laxness.
The Growth of the Soil by Hamsun.

[Anonymous No.11063482]

>>11063330

For obvious reasons slightly-tedious monotony tends to be hard to turn into interesting long fiction. That said:

>Far From The Madding Crowd (Hardy)
gives a good feel of the value of plodding along. Gabriel Oak just plods along and he gets the girl at the end because he's the only one who really deserves her.

>Lake Woebegone Stories (Keillor)
A nice, comfy, hardworking-but-let's-not-overdo-it small-town feel.

>Adam Bede (George Eliot)
Even though there's lots of melodrama, the humble-artisan quality is always there as backdrop & sea-anchor.

[Anonymous No.11063496]

>>11063330
Suttree by cormac

[Anonymous No.11064008]

I can recommend you Growth of the Soil like >>11063414

[Anonymous No.11064089]

J.L. Carr - A Month in the Country (northern Britain)
Lawrence Durell - Prospero's Cell (Greek island)
Turgheniev - A Sportsman's Sketches (Siberia)
Sherwood Anderson - Winesburg, Ohio (um, Winesburg, Ohio)
Gogol - Vyi, some early stories (Ukraine)
These might be up your alley too, but I haven't read them:
Growth of the Soil
The Book of Ebenezer le Page
The Doll

[Anonymous No.11064098]

>>11063330
>when you’re a simping ruminant whose racial instincts to be a beast of burden autist overwhelm your captured faustian aristocratic genetics and you can’t function without the smell of cattle shit and saw dust in your nostrils
there’s a whole subspecies of whites who are like this, spics too

[Anonymous No.11065524]

>>11064098
>racial instincts

[Anonymous No.11065541]

>>11063330
The Girl with the Pearl Earring might tickle your pickle

[Anonymous No.11065554]

>>11063330
The Shepherd's Life by James Rebanks is supposed to be good. Haven't read it yet myself.

[Anonymous No.11065571]

>>11063330
Tanners, Robert Walser
Robinson Jeffers (If you want that pastoral, wilderness feel in verse.)

>>11063369
seconding that

[Anonymous No.11065741]

What is the literary equivalent of Harvest Moon: Back to Nature?

[Anonymous No.11065900]

>>11063414
>>11064008
Growth of the Soil for sure.
My absolute favorite book.

I've heard the book Independent People is a lot like what you describe as well.

[Anonymous No.11065982]

>>11063330
Anna Karenina clearly. Youre the re-incarnation of Levin, anon. FWIW.

[Anonymous No.11066457]

>>11063330
Your heart yearns for Trollope and Hardy.