Once in Europa (23 page)

‘Brilliant … These stories have a remarkable sense of celebration'
Sunday Telegraph

‘
Pig Earth
is a relentlessly realist work … Doggedly scrupulous in its detail, its sheer unshowy knowledgeability … Berger is one of the few English writers who can interleave poems and political essays of equivalent intricacy'
New Statesman

As Dickens and Balzac did for their time, so John Berger does for ours, rendering the movement of a people and the passing of a way of life. In
Lilac and Flag
, the Alpine village of the two earlier volumes of the
Into Their Labours
trilogy has been forsaken for the mythic city of Troy. Here, amidst shanty-towns, factories, opulent hotels, fading heritages and steadfast dreams, the children and grandchildren of rural peasants pursue meagre livings as best they can. And two young lovers embark upon a passionate, desperate journey of love and survival and find transcending hope both for themselves and for us as their witnesses.

‘Remarkable … Like all great novelists John Berger guides his characters and readers tenderly and with intimate humour'
Michael Ondaatje

‘A magnificent trilogy … Moving in an almost unbearable way'
Anthony Burgess

This book – call it a book of love letter meditating on place, mortality, art, love and absence – is as breathtaking and spare as we have come to expect of John Berger. From his lyrical description of the works of Caravaggio, or the sight of a spray of lilac on a windowsill, to profound explorations of death and immigration, this is a beautiful and intimate response to our century.

‘He handles thoughts the way an artist handles paint. His mind is spattered with colour … His writing has a physical reality'
The Times

‘John Berger is genius invisible. His life's work is synonymous with the creation of unforgettable living portraits'
Scotsman

In his new book John Berger traces in words moments lived in Europe at the end of the millennium. These moments are not fiction. They happened. As he wrote them Berger sometimes imagined a frieze of ‘photocopies' arranged side by side, giving future readers a panoramic view of what this moment in history was like when lived. Each ‘photocopy' is about somebody for whom Berger felt a kind of love, but the book also becomes an unintentional portrait of the author as well.

‘This beautiful book bring non-fiction writing close to drawing – the sort of drawing that both records and investigates … Berger makes you believe in goodness: not an impossible state out of our reach, but a capacity in all of us to do with honesty, not faking. This is a marvelous book'
New Statesman

‘Awe-inspiring … All the writing has a still, insistent beauty … Berger sometimes manages a moment of absolute and truthful emotion, which can be extraordinary'
Observer

With an introduction by Nadeem Aslam

‘No one knows more about the necessity of love than John Berger: what love makes us capable of, and incapable of. This is a book of the most precise humanity. No one who reads it will forget what it makes us understand: every action has its twin, conscionable or unconscionable; every truth, its shadow in the world; everything lost, alive in love'
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

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

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 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'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.

This book is first a dialogue between a daughter and a father about life, physical sensation, mortality. Each seems to listen to the other with great attention. Secondly it is the extraordinary vehicle for a series of insights into the everyday life and the art of the great Venetian master, following an uncanny incident at the large exhibition of his work staged in Venice in 1990.

While attending the exhibition Katya meets an old man, who she becomes convinced can only be the ghost of the great painter. Her ‘spiritual' visitor engages her in conversation about the minute particularities of painting some of the pictures there. She shares this experience with her father in a letter. He accepts the encounter at face value and discusses the historical background to the old man's remarks, seeking answers to a series of evidential questions about his daughter's encounter. From then on, the three of them, the old painter, the daughter, and the father, discuss animals, Greece, fur, sexuality, the strangeness of drawing.

bloomsbury.com/author/john-berger

Copyright © 1983, 1984, 1986, 1987 by John Berger

This electronic edition published in 2014 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

The moral right of the author has been asserted

‘Boris Is Buying Horses' and ‘The Accordion Player' previously appeared in
Granta
no. 9 (1983) and no. 18 (1986) respectively, and ‘Play Me Something' in
The Threepenny Review
no. 20 (winter 1985).

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A CIP catalogue is available from the British Library

eISBN: 978-1-4088-5910-0

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