The World in Gentle Collapse
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.