Into Their Labours (trilogy)

After moving to Quincy in 1973, Berger spent the following seventeen years producing a trilogy that constitutes his most sustained fictional and documentary work. The three volumes move through the cycle he identified: the life of the Alpine village in Pig Earth, the transition of peasants to industrial laborers in Once in Europa, and the arrival of peasant descendants as migrants in the European city in Lilac and Flag. Taken together, the trilogy traces the dissolution of a way of life across the second half of the twentieth century — not as elegy but as witness, grounded in the specific authority of someone who lived in the village, helped with the work, and paid attention over years.