The World in Gentle Collapse

Summary

This review examines Charles Ferdinand Ramuz’s novel Into the Sun, originally published in 1922 as Présence de la mort and newly translated by Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan, in which a shift in Earth’s axis sends the planet toward the sun. It argues that the novel is both timely in its depiction of denial and profound in its reflections on nature, daily life, and humanity’s inability to comprehend catastrophe, citing the townspeople’s initially sharpened perceptions, the failure of collective action, and the descent into hysteria and violence. The review praises the translators’ rendering and retitling of the novel, concluding that it presents the end of the world as a gentle collapse marked by confusion and fear of an unimaginable fate.

Highlights

• In Charles Ferdinand Ramuz’s novel Présence de la mort (1922; retitled Into the Sun in this new translation by Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan), the Earth’s axis has shifted and the planet is hurtling towards the sun. This is a timely novel: the news of our impending destruction is met with denial, and the locals in a lakeside town in Switzerland are cynical: “[T]he newspapers weren’t selling anymore, so what do you expect?!” But Into the Sun isn’t merely prophetic; it’s also full of wise reflections on nature, the quotidian and the futility of coping with real disaster.
• Ramuz’s narrator – at times caught up in the turmoil, elsewhere detached and godly – declares that the world is ending for a different reason; because, he suggests, people have always, and wrongly, looked “without seeing”.
• People start making up for lost time and the quality of their observations strengthens – previously unnoticed steamers pass by on the water, “smoke unspooling from their chimneys like horse hairs coming unspooled at the quilters”. Gradually, the reality of what is happening sinks in, the Earth’s fate is accepted and there is mass hysteria. Attempts at rational, collective action fizzle out and are replaced by random acts of violence.
• The scale of the oncoming disaster is too much for most people, who can’t “imagine beyond what they are”. And it’s not a question of intelligence. Rather, “something has stopped beating in the arteries” of the world, and the outcome is inconceivable: “when I sought to imagine something beyond it, it was still the world that I imagined. When I sought to go past it, there I found it again”. Punctuated by confusion and fear of an incomprehensible fate, Into the Sun frames the world’s end as a gentle collapse.

Source

Author

Colm McKenna

Publication

The Times Literary Supplement

Date

August 7, 2026

URL

https://www.the-tls.com/regular-features/in-brief/into-the-sun-charles-ferdinand-ramuz-book-review-colm-mckenna ↗

Reviewed work

Into the Sun by Charles Ferdinand Ramuz, translated by Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan