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Into the Sun
It’s been a hot summer for a Swiss lakeside town—both bucolic and citylike, old-fashioned and up-to-date—when a “great message,” telegraphed from one continent to another, announces an “accident in the gravitational system." Something has gone wrong with the axis of the Earth that will send our planet plunging into the sun: it’s the end of the world, though one hardly notices it, yet ... “Thus all life will come to an end. The heat will rise. It will be excruciating for all living things … And yet nothing is visible for the moment.”
For now the surface of the lake is as calm as can be, and the wine harvest promises to be sweet. Most flowers, however, have died. The stars grow bigger, and the sun turns from orange-red to red, and then to black-red. First comes denial: “The news is from America, you know what that means.” Then come first farewells: counting and naming beloved things—the rectangular meadows, the grapes on the vines, the lake. In its beauty the world is saying, “Look at me,” before it ends.
The prophetic Into the Sun vividly voices the initial disbelief, the rejection of the increasingly obvious facts, and the suppression of the gnawing doubts. Ramuz describes denial, fear, melancholy, despair, reckless abandon, and a swift slide into anarchy. Everyone seeks relief in the lake while the sun drinks it up “as if through a straw.” Ramuz’s terrifyingly gripping scenario of a burning planet and the demise of humankind—now so fatefully on our horizon—is a stirring blast from the past, a truly hair-raising tour de force.
For now the surface of the lake is as calm as can be, and the wine harvest promises to be sweet. Most flowers, however, have died. The stars grow bigger, and the sun turns from orange-red to red, and then to black-red. First comes denial: “The news is from America, you know what that means.” Then come first farewells: counting and naming beloved things—the rectangular meadows, the grapes on the vines, the lake. In its beauty the world is saying, “Look at me,” before it ends.
The prophetic Into the Sun vividly voices the initial disbelief, the rejection of the increasingly obvious facts, and the suppression of the gnawing doubts. Ramuz describes denial, fear, melancholy, despair, reckless abandon, and a swift slide into anarchy. Everyone seeks relief in the lake while the sun drinks it up “as if through a straw.” Ramuz’s terrifyingly gripping scenario of a burning planet and the demise of humankind—now so fatefully on our horizon—is a stirring blast from the past, a truly hair-raising tour de force.
144 pages, Paperback
Published August 19, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
January 6, 2026
The most interesting part of this novel was the translator's note, which admits how disorienting and abstract the novel is. Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan did an excellent job translating a novel that is unconfined by syntax and language - Ramuz experiments so much with tense, perspective, punctuation, and pronouns that it is hard to pin down what the hell is going on.
There's no denying the novel is incredibly prescient in its prediction of the end times (similar to Parable of the Sower), which is ultimately bisected by class and privilege. Though the apocalypse spells death for humanity in the novel, the disparate consequences and approach to the inevitable end look very different for those with the resources and means to survive. We explore the collective perspective of humanity alongside the individual experiences of survivors, each of whom grapples with denial, survival, and mortality.
Ramuz offers plenty of great reflections - the hubris of humanity, how easily we descend into anarchy, and the fickle boundary between collectivism and individualism amidst times of turmoil. With that said, I fear the commentary is buried beneath writing that is ultimately too dense and cerebral to be of any enjoyment. I was rarely able to keep up with what was going on, and once I finally got my bearings, the chapter ended, and we moved on to the next perspective.
A novel that deserves appreciation for what it accomplishes, but ultimately not one I found enjoyable to read.
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There's no denying the novel is incredibly prescient in its prediction of the end times (similar to Parable of the Sower), which is ultimately bisected by class and privilege. Though the apocalypse spells death for humanity in the novel, the disparate consequences and approach to the inevitable end look very different for those with the resources and means to survive. We explore the collective perspective of humanity alongside the individual experiences of survivors, each of whom grapples with denial, survival, and mortality.
Ramuz offers plenty of great reflections - the hubris of humanity, how easily we descend into anarchy, and the fickle boundary between collectivism and individualism amidst times of turmoil. With that said, I fear the commentary is buried beneath writing that is ultimately too dense and cerebral to be of any enjoyment. I was rarely able to keep up with what was going on, and once I finally got my bearings, the chapter ended, and we moved on to the next perspective.
A novel that deserves appreciation for what it accomplishes, but ultimately not one I found enjoyable to read.
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September 29, 2025
It seems these days, that few books live up to their exciting premise, but this, though I hurriedly add was first published in 1922, certainly does.
One day the news of earth’s imminent destruction is announced by telegram. “Because of an accident within the gravitational system,” the telegram says, “the Earth is rapidly plunging into the sun.” It continues, “The heat will rise and rapidly everything will die.”
Science fiction, perhaps, but such an impossible scenario may better be termed as speculative fiction. But Ramuz picks it up and runs with it, and it enables him to do some great things. His characters, none of which he seems to like very much, are banded together without status; everyone is about to die at the same time, ‘For there is no longer any difference between them.’
This news arrives to an idyllic Swiss village in June, enjoying an unusually hot and dry, and splendid summer. At first it fails to penetrate the consciousness of the villagers and vacationers, they think it’s from America, and invented to liven up the newspapers. But events proceed rapidly; there is a workers’s uprising, the trains cease, revolution turns to anarchy.
It’s republication in a new translation a couple of months ago by New Directions is opportune. A natural disaster threatening civilization, the news greeted with denial, an unbearable heat, struggles over resources, a growing sense of doom. But this was 1922, and though one might expect World War references this is more like a fable told in Ramuz’s lyrical prose. He manages to keep the ‘what if it’s true?’ sense of alarm throughout. It’s less of a warning to mankind, rather a meditation on mortality.
One day the news of earth’s imminent destruction is announced by telegram. “Because of an accident within the gravitational system,” the telegram says, “the Earth is rapidly plunging into the sun.” It continues, “The heat will rise and rapidly everything will die.”
Science fiction, perhaps, but such an impossible scenario may better be termed as speculative fiction. But Ramuz picks it up and runs with it, and it enables him to do some great things. His characters, none of which he seems to like very much, are banded together without status; everyone is about to die at the same time, ‘For there is no longer any difference between them.’
This news arrives to an idyllic Swiss village in June, enjoying an unusually hot and dry, and splendid summer. At first it fails to penetrate the consciousness of the villagers and vacationers, they think it’s from America, and invented to liven up the newspapers. But events proceed rapidly; there is a workers’s uprising, the trains cease, revolution turns to anarchy.
It’s republication in a new translation a couple of months ago by New Directions is opportune. A natural disaster threatening civilization, the news greeted with denial, an unbearable heat, struggles over resources, a growing sense of doom. But this was 1922, and though one might expect World War references this is more like a fable told in Ramuz’s lyrical prose. He manages to keep the ‘what if it’s true?’ sense of alarm throughout. It’s less of a warning to mankind, rather a meditation on mortality.
May 21, 2025
Ramuz is a fascinating early 20th C. Swiss writer whose subtly thought-provoking work is ripe for rediscovery. Case in point: Into The Sun's eerily prescient story revealing the beauty and pain of ordinary people reacting to the sudden revolt of the natural world: elegantly unsettling. 9/10
September 23, 2025
Into the Sun is a eulogy, a dirge, and a requiem for The Earth, who is dying faster than the people upon it. In the rich and poetic history weaving among the dying and death of the people and their Earth, the reader sees that once the people loved the earth and loved each other until the powers of war created bondage. More wars were fought internally and externally ostensibly for freedom. Hah! Wars for the illusion of freedom. Because throughout it all, the people stopped loving. Stopped loving themselves, each other, and especially the Earth as it began to tip towards the sun.
Ramuz's deeply poetic telling of the people writhingly dying, still killing each other, and the Earth is visceral. How is it - it being history and current events - different than 100 years ago? Sadly and writhingly so, it is not different, only more progressed.
Ramuz is an exquisite writer. I am reminded of D.H.Lawrence, and the ability to express conflict, love, hatred, power in a ceaseless and emotional frenzy. Proceed at your own risk.
Next time I read it, I will have Henri Gorecki Symphony No 3 playing.
Ramuz's deeply poetic telling of the people writhingly dying, still killing each other, and the Earth is visceral. How is it - it being history and current events - different than 100 years ago? Sadly and writhingly so, it is not different, only more progressed.
Ramuz is an exquisite writer. I am reminded of D.H.Lawrence, and the ability to express conflict, love, hatred, power in a ceaseless and emotional frenzy. Proceed at your own risk.
Next time I read it, I will have Henri Gorecki Symphony No 3 playing.
August 18, 2025
oh wow, this is a unique book.
Faced with the guaranteed end of the world by being engulfed by the sun, what does humanity mean? with nothing to fight for, nothing to work for, nothing to live for, is humanity ultimately about survival of the fittest? living traditionally and ignoring the inevitable? sharing what is left with each other?
Of course, there is no answer. in the end, we are alone, yet we are together.
As Tom Lehrer said, we will all go together when we go".
Contextually, an interesting read to understand the mindset of French people and culture following the seemingly world-ending Great War. people's reaction to tragedies cannot be predicted- but perhaps the fact that we have different reactions in the face of tragedy is what makes up humanity.
I'll have to reread this again to actually make sense of this. it's very cyclical, by which I mean that the end is the beginning, and the beginning the end.
Faced with the guaranteed end of the world by being engulfed by the sun, what does humanity mean? with nothing to fight for, nothing to work for, nothing to live for, is humanity ultimately about survival of the fittest? living traditionally and ignoring the inevitable? sharing what is left with each other?
Of course, there is no answer. in the end, we are alone, yet we are together.
As Tom Lehrer said, we will all go together when we go".
Contextually, an interesting read to understand the mindset of French people and culture following the seemingly world-ending Great War. people's reaction to tragedies cannot be predicted- but perhaps the fact that we have different reactions in the face of tragedy is what makes up humanity.
I'll have to reread this again to actually make sense of this. it's very cyclical, by which I mean that the end is the beginning, and the beginning the end.
August 26, 2025
The whole premise of this novel was too exciting to be put down. Here we have a climate disaster novel that depicts the terminal days of the planet when the Earth starts slowly plunging into the sun owing to an "accident in the gravitational system". It started out well enough, but as I advanced further into the novel, I was pretty much stumped by the way the narrative petered out. The writer has a tough, indirect style that speaks out to you on several fronts. It's eminently a third-person narrative, and it is as if the writer is narrating the events in his nonchalant manner, and at the same time, he is trying to reflect the different viewpoints that might exist for each event in reckoning. Probably the writer was trying his best to work in a style reminiscent of some of the master navigators of the human psyche that we had in the past, and it is worth noting that the person in question was a prolific Swiss-French novelist of the early part of the twentieth century. So it is without doubt that he was being influenced by such a dense and cerebral style which seemed, to me at least, to be too involved for a novel that has as its thematic semblance steeped in climate disaster. Nevertheless, it is a wonderfully prescient and careening account of a dreadful reality that humanity will face in the distant future.
The translators, in their afterword, has to say a lot about Ramuz's style:
Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, one of the great Swiss writers of the twentieth century, wrote in French, but sought to capture something beyond “le bon français” in his writing. Rather than the “langue morte” of the French he learned in school, he composed a living language, something that could utter life itself. He wanted to express the texture of his native Swiss countryside, how Vaudois French is tossed around the mouth, how his countrymen walk up a mountain or down a country lane.......In his manifesto Raison d’être, Ramuz proclaims: “O, accent, you are in our words, but you are not yet in our art. You are in the gestures, you are in the bearing, and even in the shuffling step of the person who returns from harvesting or pruning his vineyard: consider this gait and the fact that our sentences don’t have it.”........
.........Ramuz’s quest to communicate how life is truly lived went beyond punctuation and rhythm to include abrupt shifts in tense to show that everything is always happening simultaneously, that nothing is separate from anything else, that there is no such thing as a tidy chronology when we are talking about the substance of life. The havoc of nature is happening, and already happened. You are frightened because it is happening, and because you can do nothing to prevent it since it has already happened.........With the present tense in parenthesis, the all-seeing Ramuz is commenting in real time about the past actions he’s recounting. In the land of Ramuz, this present is always inextricably linked with the past, with the future.
He uses repetition to the same dizzying end, amplifying the ricochets around us until we have lost our sense of time and place, swept up in the inevitable victory of the natural world.....
Evidently, there is a lot to look forward to with this writer, recently rediscovered by New Directions, and I aim to explore his style further.
The translators, in their afterword, has to say a lot about Ramuz's style:
Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, one of the great Swiss writers of the twentieth century, wrote in French, but sought to capture something beyond “le bon français” in his writing. Rather than the “langue morte” of the French he learned in school, he composed a living language, something that could utter life itself. He wanted to express the texture of his native Swiss countryside, how Vaudois French is tossed around the mouth, how his countrymen walk up a mountain or down a country lane.......In his manifesto Raison d’être, Ramuz proclaims: “O, accent, you are in our words, but you are not yet in our art. You are in the gestures, you are in the bearing, and even in the shuffling step of the person who returns from harvesting or pruning his vineyard: consider this gait and the fact that our sentences don’t have it.”........
.........Ramuz’s quest to communicate how life is truly lived went beyond punctuation and rhythm to include abrupt shifts in tense to show that everything is always happening simultaneously, that nothing is separate from anything else, that there is no such thing as a tidy chronology when we are talking about the substance of life. The havoc of nature is happening, and already happened. You are frightened because it is happening, and because you can do nothing to prevent it since it has already happened.........With the present tense in parenthesis, the all-seeing Ramuz is commenting in real time about the past actions he’s recounting. In the land of Ramuz, this present is always inextricably linked with the past, with the future.
He uses repetition to the same dizzying end, amplifying the ricochets around us until we have lost our sense of time and place, swept up in the inevitable victory of the natural world.....
Evidently, there is a lot to look forward to with this writer, recently rediscovered by New Directions, and I aim to explore his style further.
January 6, 2026
This book is smart and the translation is even smarter. Terrifying to think it was written a hundred years ago and feels like it could happen today.
November 25, 2025
Loved it! Beautiful lyrical writing
January 26, 2026
In thirty one brief chapters (and less than 150 pages), Ramuz chronicles a Swiss lake's collection of surrounding villages as the earth, due to some gravitational hiccup, shifts orbit and spins closer and closer toward the sun. Jumping between numerous named and unnamed characters, we see first-hand how a collection of municipalities reckon with the news of the coming calamity, and the lived reality when temperatures begin to rise, and rise, and rise.
There are a lot of things covered in Into the Sun: time is spent describing the way people's relationship to the world changes when they're suddenly faced with the end. The world splinters into chaos but people also find in each other unexpected kinship. And some people focus on the most trivial, immaterial things to suspend their disbelief for however long. Stylistically all of these smaller points are complemented; tense moves fluidly, punctuation is erratic and difficult to predict. The language reflects the people.
But despite all these other themes it was the lake itself that captured my interest. The centerpiece at the beginning and end of the book, it's first described like an old mountain, some solid, unchangeable, granite thing. Activity around it seems as telling of the passage of time as the changing of the seasons. But at the end of the book, the unchanging lake begins to evaporate, with no rain to replenish its store. Townspeople lug themselves forward through the heat toward the murky brown water. It's unclear if they're seeking refuge from the heat or marching toward a more dignified death. It's unclear if there's a difference.
There are a lot of things covered in Into the Sun: time is spent describing the way people's relationship to the world changes when they're suddenly faced with the end. The world splinters into chaos but people also find in each other unexpected kinship. And some people focus on the most trivial, immaterial things to suspend their disbelief for however long. Stylistically all of these smaller points are complemented; tense moves fluidly, punctuation is erratic and difficult to predict. The language reflects the people.
But despite all these other themes it was the lake itself that captured my interest. The centerpiece at the beginning and end of the book, it's first described like an old mountain, some solid, unchangeable, granite thing. Activity around it seems as telling of the passage of time as the changing of the seasons. But at the end of the book, the unchanging lake begins to evaporate, with no rain to replenish its store. Townspeople lug themselves forward through the heat toward the murky brown water. It's unclear if they're seeking refuge from the heat or marching toward a more dignified death. It's unclear if there's a difference.
January 11, 2026
I loved the world too much; I see that I loved it too much. Now that it is going away. I became too attached to it, and I see now that it is detaching itself from me. I loved it completely, despite itself. I loved it despite its imperfections, completely,-- because of its imperfections, having seen that only through these imperfections did perfection exist; and it was good because it was bad...
I tried closing my eyes to see the heavens: it was Earth; and the heavens were the heavens only when they became Earth once again.
"I loved it completely, despite itself"--yeah :( perfectly sums up how I feel about this place.
Super enjoyed this, underlined the hell out of it. Gorgeous writing in some parts, and some truly baffling writing in others. Would have been a new fave if not for the the parts that left me feeling so ???? huh???
I tried closing my eyes to see the heavens: it was Earth; and the heavens were the heavens only when they became Earth once again.
"I loved it completely, despite itself"--yeah :( perfectly sums up how I feel about this place.
Super enjoyed this, underlined the hell out of it. Gorgeous writing in some parts, and some truly baffling writing in others. Would have been a new fave if not for the the parts that left me feeling so ???? huh???
January 29, 2026
frankly i think this book missed me a bit…
this is an ahead-of-its-time piece detailing the tragic heat-death of humanity. we watch the world crack under pressure and fizzle out. we watch intimacy emerge and disintegrate as society crumbles and everyone is reduced to the base instincts of survival. and while it’s certainly well-written in many areas… i didn’t find much value in this surgical analysis of the human condition. this leaves me feeling a bit hollow rather than full of newfound insight.
this is an ahead-of-its-time piece detailing the tragic heat-death of humanity. we watch the world crack under pressure and fizzle out. we watch intimacy emerge and disintegrate as society crumbles and everyone is reduced to the base instincts of survival. and while it’s certainly well-written in many areas… i didn’t find much value in this surgical analysis of the human condition. this leaves me feeling a bit hollow rather than full of newfound insight.
February 12, 2026
Ummm sorry to be a wuss but this was very scary which may have contributed to it being sometimes…unreadable? The repetitive motif and rhythm and the lack of a center contributed to the book’s mystique at its best. At its worst I was scared as well as bored, like the characters I suppose sweating vaguely and waiting for the end
September 18, 2025
Poetic, dreamlike end-of-the-world tale, originally published in 1922 in France. It can be a little hard to follow but just stick with it, it's got some really lyrical passages, giving your brain lots of knotty imagery to chew on (it's also very short, I read it within a day).
October 13, 2025
An early twentieth-century, polyphonic, apocalyptic novel in the vein of Wells and Bradbury; a precursor to THE STAND, even. Didn't connect as well as I'd hoped, but the prescience, the depiction of societal collapse, the off-handed style, is quite rich.
September 22, 2025
Hard to believe this was written over a century ago. It's an intense fever-dream of societal collapse due to rapid climate change.
January 3, 2026
“Solitude, silence; solitude everywhere and silence.” This level of repetition is what drove me from this novel every time. Wanted to love this, but it’s not for me.
January 22, 2026
Once again, #better than beloved
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews