The Alps, I’m afraid to say, are no longer a cool place. After seven hours under an excoriating August sun, toiling over rock and rubble, I was looking to call it a day. So when I came up to the Swiss Alpine Club’s Maighels Hut at five in the afternoon, it seemed better to overnight there instead of pressing on to the nearest railhead.
An hour later, when calling us to supper, the warden was kind enough to seat me next to a German actress who was starting her career with a theatre company in Bern. Which happened to be rehearsing an adaptation of a century-old novel that asked what people would do if the planet suddenly started to heat up…
Picking up on this lead back home, I ordered a copy of Into the Sun (1922) by the Swiss author C F Ramuz (1878–1947). The novel has been twice translated into English, most recently by Emma Ramadan and Olivia Baes just last year. The original title, Présence de la mort, is a good indication of where the author means to take us.
The scene is set when news of a “gravitational accident” is radioed across the Atlantic – from the west side to the east, inevitably. As a result, “the earth is rapidly plunging into the sun, pelting toward it, to melt there.”
Ramuz wastes no time with the mechanics of this mishap. Suffice it to say that he published his novel just two years after Milutin Milanković came out with his theory that the earth’s orbital wobbles were responsible for the Ice Ages.
More probably, the novelist simply took his inspiration from the ferociously hot summer of 1921, when the thermometers in Geneva got within biting distance of 40 degrees Celsius – just as they did in the summer of this year.
On the shores of Lake Geneva, Ramuz’s home territory, people are more concerned with their gardens and crops than with orbital eccentricities. The news from America is met with indifference. A woman leans out a window and asks a friend if she’s read the latest paper. No, she replies, “What do I care?”
The newspaper reaches some labourers at a farm. They too are unfazed: “It’s too big, that’s the thing. It’s not for us, it’s too big. Our own world is so small. Our own world goes as far as our eyes can reach; it’s our eyes that create it for us.”
This remark comes from an anonymous narrator, who often seems to speak for the characters on the page, or even blur his identity with theirs. After just the first few chapters, we learn that we’re not going to see things through the eyes of just a few lead characters, as in a conventional plot. Rather this is a novel about mass psychology.
And that psychology is eerily familiar. By the fourth chapter, the news is starting to get around. “Just imagine, it could be true!” says a woman at the grocery store, only to be contradicted by another customer: “What nonsense! … The news comes from America, you know what that means. The newspapers weren’t selling any more, so what do you expect?!” At the chapter’s end, somebody is told to just shut up…
Présence de la mort has never been made into a movie. That’s a pity, given that Ramuz’s approach is eminently cinematic. A familiar local scene is built up, only to be disrupted with some sinister revelation. By Chapter 7, the temperature has started to rise by a degree a day, so the narrator hears. And “this is when we saw police officers already stationed in front of the National Bank”.
From here on, the social order starts to fray at a quickening pace. Still, “Few raise their eyes to the sky, few understand it. Few know even of its existence, that great mechanism above…” But this doesn’t make any difference. As always, “There are those who have and those who have not.” Increasingly too, the have-nots realise that “Now nothing can stop us doing what we want.”
In the ensuing chapters, workers loot and burn a tavern, the electricity cuts off, and the authorial camera lingers on the aftermath of a battle between troops and railway workers. Meanwhile the outlying villages barricade themselves into defensive “republics”. Unable to stand the prospect of what may come next, a middle-class character called Gavillet opens the dresser drawer and takes out his revolver…
Only a few of C F Ramuz’s twenty or so novels are available in English. Readers of the best-known of these translations, Terror on the Mountain and Derborence, will think of Ramuz as a chronicler of the struggle to survive in the high alpine villages. So it’s a surprise to find that most of Into the Sun’s action takes place in the lowlands bordering Lake Geneva.
Towards the novel’s end, though, the rugged peasants of the Vaud mountains get their look-in. In the hope of finding a refuge from the heat, thuggish townees climb up to a summer alp and drive the cowherds from their hut at gunpoint. What happens next can be left to your imagination – or you can read the book in the excellent new translation. Likewise, the novel’s ending is so unexpected that it would be a sin to summarise it here.
Other reviewers have rightly pointed out that Into the Sun is not about climate change. In Ramuz’s day, almost nobody could imagine that burning fossil fuels could do us all in. Yet everybody in his generation had seen what happens when a once-genial civilisation slides into the abyss. So the novel should be seen less as science fiction and more as a meditation on death, prompted by memories of the First World War and the ensuing influenza epidemics.
In her perceptive appreciation, Dawn Macdonald sets the novel in its historical context:
Picking up on this lead back home, I ordered a copy of Into the Sun (1922) by the Swiss author C F Ramuz (1878–1947). The novel has been twice translated into English, most recently by Emma Ramadan and Olivia Baes just last year. The original title, Présence de la mort, is a good indication of where the author means to take us.
The scene is set when news of a “gravitational accident” is radioed across the Atlantic – from the west side to the east, inevitably. As a result, “the earth is rapidly plunging into the sun, pelting toward it, to melt there.”
Ramuz wastes no time with the mechanics of this mishap. Suffice it to say that he published his novel just two years after Milutin Milanković came out with his theory that the earth’s orbital wobbles were responsible for the Ice Ages.
More probably, the novelist simply took his inspiration from the ferociously hot summer of 1921, when the thermometers in Geneva got within biting distance of 40 degrees Celsius – just as they did in the summer of this year.
On the shores of Lake Geneva, Ramuz’s home territory, people are more concerned with their gardens and crops than with orbital eccentricities. The news from America is met with indifference. A woman leans out a window and asks a friend if she’s read the latest paper. No, she replies, “What do I care?”
The newspaper reaches some labourers at a farm. They too are unfazed: “It’s too big, that’s the thing. It’s not for us, it’s too big. Our own world is so small. Our own world goes as far as our eyes can reach; it’s our eyes that create it for us.”
This remark comes from an anonymous narrator, who often seems to speak for the characters on the page, or even blur his identity with theirs. After just the first few chapters, we learn that we’re not going to see things through the eyes of just a few lead characters, as in a conventional plot. Rather this is a novel about mass psychology.
And that psychology is eerily familiar. By the fourth chapter, the news is starting to get around. “Just imagine, it could be true!” says a woman at the grocery store, only to be contradicted by another customer: “What nonsense! … The news comes from America, you know what that means. The newspapers weren’t selling any more, so what do you expect?!” At the chapter’s end, somebody is told to just shut up…
Présence de la mort has never been made into a movie. That’s a pity, given that Ramuz’s approach is eminently cinematic. A familiar local scene is built up, only to be disrupted with some sinister revelation. By Chapter 7, the temperature has started to rise by a degree a day, so the narrator hears. And “this is when we saw police officers already stationed in front of the National Bank”.
From here on, the social order starts to fray at a quickening pace. Still, “Few raise their eyes to the sky, few understand it. Few know even of its existence, that great mechanism above…” But this doesn’t make any difference. As always, “There are those who have and those who have not.” Increasingly too, the have-nots realise that “Now nothing can stop us doing what we want.”
In the ensuing chapters, workers loot and burn a tavern, the electricity cuts off, and the authorial camera lingers on the aftermath of a battle between troops and railway workers. Meanwhile the outlying villages barricade themselves into defensive “republics”. Unable to stand the prospect of what may come next, a middle-class character called Gavillet opens the dresser drawer and takes out his revolver…
Only a few of C F Ramuz’s twenty or so novels are available in English. Readers of the best-known of these translations, Terror on the Mountain and Derborence, will think of Ramuz as a chronicler of the struggle to survive in the high alpine villages. So it’s a surprise to find that most of Into the Sun’s action takes place in the lowlands bordering Lake Geneva.
Towards the novel’s end, though, the rugged peasants of the Vaud mountains get their look-in. In the hope of finding a refuge from the heat, thuggish townees climb up to a summer alp and drive the cowherds from their hut at gunpoint. What happens next can be left to your imagination – or you can read the book in the excellent new translation. Likewise, the novel’s ending is so unexpected that it would be a sin to summarise it here.
Other reviewers have rightly pointed out that Into the Sun is not about climate change. In Ramuz’s day, almost nobody could imagine that burning fossil fuels could do us all in. Yet everybody in his generation had seen what happens when a once-genial civilisation slides into the abyss. So the novel should be seen less as science fiction and more as a meditation on death, prompted by memories of the First World War and the ensuing influenza epidemics.
In her perceptive appreciation, Dawn Macdonald sets the novel in its historical context:
The 1920s might be remembered now as a non-stop party filled with carefree flappers and hot jazz, but much literature of the era depicts a troubled milieu of dissipation, cynicism, and apathy. Quite a few classics of apocalyptic and dystopian fiction appeared around this time, including Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924), Karel Čapek’s stage play R.U.R.: Rossum’s Universal Robots (1920) and his novel The Absolute at Large (1922), and W.E.B. Du Bois’s short story “The Comet” (1920).
All the same, Ramuz did anticipate, almost clairvoyantly, how people might respond to a looming cataclysm. Of course, in his scenario, there was no way to forestall the threat. With climate change, the deck is stacked a tad more generously. Disaster might just be averted or at least mitigated. So it would be a pity if, by doing nothing, we were to find out if Into the Sun's later chapters are as prescient as the early ones.
Next morning, I took the chance to visit the nearby source of the Rhine on the way to the station. Fortunately, the little lake was still there – unlike the great river’s other tributary, in the nearby Surselva region. When I’d visited that source region back in June, the watercourse had been dry as Prohibition.
References
Charles Ferdinand Ramuz, Into the Sun, translated by Emma Ramadan and Olivia Baes, New Directions Publishing Corp, 2025.
Bühnen Bern is staging Ewige Sonne (Eternal Sun) at Vidmar 1, a double-bill adaptation of two novels by Swiss writer Charles Ferdinand Ramuz (Sturz in die Sonne and Dorf im Himmel), translated into German by Steven Wyss. Performances from October 24, 2026 through February 24, 2027.
