by John Berger
Anne Michaels
A mother and father, estranged for years, are travelling across Europe to their daughter’s wedding. Vibrant, beautiful Ninon has fallen in love with the young Italian Gino. She is twenty-three years old – and she is dying of AIDS. As their wedding approaches, the story of Ninon and Gino unfolds. On their wedding day, Ninon will take off her shoes and dance with Gino: they will dance as if they will never tire; as if their happiness is eternal; as if death will never touch them. To the Wedding is a novel of devastating heartache, soaring hope and above all, love that triumphs over death.
‘A great, sad, and tender lyric, a novel that is a vortex of community and compassion that somehow overcomes fate and death’
Michael Ondaatje
‘A wonderful book, one which yields immediate pleasure and promises to stay long in the mind’
Sunday Times
‘The finale, the wedding itself, is a masterpiece … This is a novel that will haunt you’
Sunday Telegraph
‘One of the greatest and most honest love stories of our time’
Colum McCann
Here is Where We Meet
No one appreciates the detail of being alive more than the dead. In Lisbon, a man encounters his mother sitting on a park bench who laughs with the impudence of a schoolgirl. She has been dead for fifteen years. In Krakow market he recognises Ken, his passeur, the most important person in his life between the ages of eleven and seventeen. They last met when Ken was sixty-five – forty years ago. The number of lives that enter any one life is incalculable. In this nomadic and playful book, which travels through fictions across Europe, seemingly disparate stories reveal themselves to be linked, mislaid objects find their place and sensual memories penetrate the present.
‘A triumph … Magical … Peppered with unforgettable images, it makes us stop and take a breath. It makes us see the world afresh’
Guardian
‘Is there anyone today who has done more to change the way we look at art and its relationship to time, landscape and social life than Berger? … He has created a body of work unrivalled in the breadth of forms and genres it spans, its sensuous intelligence, its radical humanism and its ceaseless commitment to carrying out E. M. Forster’s famous injunction: “Only connect”’
Daily Telegraph
About Looking
As a novelist, essayist and cultural historian, John Berger is a writer of dazzling eloquence and arresting insight whose work amounts to a subtle but powerful critique of the canons of our civilization. In About Looking he explores our role as observers to reveal new layers of meaning in what we see. How do the animals we look at in zoos remind us of a relationship between man and beast all but lost in the twenty-first century? What is it about looking at war photographs that doubles their already potent violence? How do the nudes of Rodin betray the threats to his authority and the potency posed by clay and flesh? And how does solitude inform the art of Giacometti? In asking these and other questions, Berger alters the vision of everyone who reads his work.
‘I admire and love John Berger’s books. He writes about what is important, not just interesting … A wonderful artist and thinker’ Susan Sontag
‘Berger is a writer one demands to know more about … An intriguing and powerful mind and talent’
New York Times
The Shape of a Pocket
‘The pocket in question is a small pocket of resistance. A pocket is formed when two or more people come together in agreement. The resistance is against the inhumanity of the new world economic order. The people coming together are the reader, me and those the essays are about – Rembrandt, Palaeolithic cave painters, a Romanian peasant, ancient Egyptians, an expert in the loneliness of hotel bedrooms, dogs at dusk, a man in a radio station. And unexpectedly, our exchanges strengthen each of us in our conviction that what is happening to the world today is wrong, and that what is often said about it is a lie. I’ve never written a book with a greater sense of urgency’ John Berger
‘An epic parable’
Independent
‘He handles thoughts the way an artist handles paint. His mind is spattered with colour. These essays smell of oil and resin and sweat, not only because they are about painters, but because his writing has a physical reality’
The Times
John Berger: Selected Essays
Edited by Geoff Dyer
John Berger’s diverse achievements as a writer are widely recognized. As well as plays, novels, short stories and poetry, he has always written essays, expressing more than forty years of tireless intellectual enquiry and fierce political engagement. Polemical, meditative, radical, always original (‘The moment at which a piece of music begins provides a clue to the nature of all art’) Berger’s essays are also extremely wide-ranging. Photographers, artists, thinkers and peasants, zoos, museums and cities he has travelled to are among his subjects, sometimes within the space of a single essay.
The occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday in November 2001 provides the opportunity to pay tribute to the rich variety of Berger’s ideas and concerns. Viewed chronologically, this collection does not simply show how his views have changed or his thought has evolved, it can also be seen as a kind of vicarious autobiography and a history of our time as seen through the prism of art.
The central concerns that have underpinned all Berger’s writing are the enduring mystery of great art and the lived experience of the oppressed, preoccupations that are amply demonstrated here in Geoff Dyer’s thoughtful selection from Permanent Red, The Moment of Cubism, The Look of Things, About Looking, The White Bird and Keeping a Rendezvous. If you have never read John Berger before, then this book is a good place to start.
bloomsbury.com/author/john-berger
First published in Great Britain
by Prestel Publishing Ltd in 1996
This electronic edition published in 2014 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Copyright © Prestel-Verlag, Munich, New York 1996
Translation of poem on page 53 by Lenore Mayhew
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
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eISBN: 978-1-4088-5956-8
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