Once in Europa was published by Pantheon Books in 1987, the second volume of the Into Their Labours trilogy. Where Pig Earth documented peasant life in its integrity, Once in Europa chronicles its transformation — the moment when industrial modernity arrives (in the form of a factory, new roads, television, consumer goods) and the community begins to fracture.
The five stories are all love stories — or more precisely, stories of desire and loss set against the backdrop of historical change. Berger writes desire with extraordinary physical precision: bodies at work, bodies in love, the weight and texture and warmth of physical presence. But each love story is also a story of historical displacement — of people pulled away from the community by economic forces they cannot control, of relationships that cannot survive the pressures of modernity, of a way of life that desire cannot preserve.
The arrival of the factory is treated not as melodramatic invasion but as slow erosion: young people take factory jobs because the farm cannot support them; money changes social relations; television introduces desires that the village cannot satisfy; language itself shifts as the dialect of work gives way to the jargon of consumption.
Berger writes these transformations without nostalgia: he knows the old life was hard, constrained, sometimes suffocating. But he also knows that what replaces it is not freedom but a different kind of unfreedom — the unfreedom of the market, of consumer desire, of lives organized around production and consumption rather than seasons and community.
Collecting Once in Europa
First edition (Pantheon Books, New York, 1987): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First US edition in dust jacket: $15–$35
- Signed copies: $40–$100
- UK first (Granta, 1989): $10–$25