John Berger (1926–2017)

Berger's stories in this volume are thick and rich, like Wendell Berry's short stories. Perhaps the metaphor is stolen from Berger himself: he presents a ham stock soup too well. I adored the Historical Afterword; I appreciated the poems and line drawings somewhat less, although the departure from standard short story collection format was welcome. The Berry comparison struck me throughout several of the stories, particularly "The Value of Money," which is reminiscent ideologically of show more several of Berry's essays in "The Way of Ignorance," in which the role that technology plays in the physical, spiritual, and economic life of agricultural communities is seen through the emotion of those who have to live with it. The last and longest piece in Berger's book, "The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol," brought together the staring honesty of Anderson's grotesques in "Winesburg" and a winding sort of spiritual experience built on base experience that captures the mystery of place in a way that straightforward tellings of any tale, true or fiction, cannot even aspire to. show less

Great read, and highly recommendable. From the first essay, which is a riff on/exegesis of Walter Benjamin's essay on the work of art in the age of mechanical reproductibility, this book is consistently on-point. Yes, the theses have been questioned in subsequent decades. But, on the other hand, I find myself continuing to agree with its strident, polemical critique of art in capitalist societies. Besides the first essay, which provides some compelling, concrete examples of the sorts of show more issues that Benjamin's work brings to the surface, the third essay (on gender, and how women are constituted as objects in painting, while men are subjects), and the last essay (on advertising) were my favorites.

I must admit that I have a great admiration for this era of radical leftist (Marxist) thought. I don't think it matters what your political persuasion is: it seems important to keep taking the theses presented here seriously. Yes, they are pessimistic (culture is essentially a function of the ruling class's imposition of its values), and yes, I could easily think of ways to problematize many of their stongest theses. The idea that when we are naked we are most authentically our own selves, for example. I'm committed enough to Jacques Derrida's philosophical project to immediately question that idea. But nonetheless, if you take a moment to situate this book in its historical moment (the early 1970s, a time when some of the great Western Marxist texts were really being seriously studied in Britain and in the USA, and a time when Althusserian structuralist Marxism was also a powerful influence), I think this book is both powerful and capable of speaking to our present.

Finally, as someone whose primary interest is in literature (texts, versus images), I thought this book's reproduction of more than 100 paintings, photographs, and advertisements was extremely helpful. Even in the mass-market/pocket paperback edition, the small black-and-white images were comprehensible and helpful. show less

After making a false start with this work, I tried again. This time I was determined to be open and not resist its non-linear story, its mystical narration. And this time it was easy.

Well, not easy, but by reading more attentively I could make clear sense of it. The novel is anything but an easy experience. From the beginning, we know that Ninon (we don't know her name yet) will die of AIDS, yet there is talk of a wedding. The book title says even To the Wedding. How will that fit? And why show more is it that a blind man tells us what can be seen?

God, I could just cry again.

Berger takes us on several journeys through the heights of living with its ecstatic joys to the gulping gasps of drowning rage. Peopled by characters who lived through the oppressive struggles of Eastern Europe and now in 1995 have dreams for their children, like Ninon, that won't be realized even after the fall of the USSR. We travel through Europe, through Time, and meet strangers that are sometimes poison, some are a part of Chorus that offer solace through understanding, and some souls that rebel against the unfamiliar changes of Time.

Yes, Berger does take us to the wedding. And it is the most beautiful wedding ever, a magnum opus of humanity joining to rejoice for love! Pages and pages of music, dancing, rich food, intoxicating drink, sweet wedding cake, little gate-crasher boys, tears, cheers, and of course, the most beautiful bride and the most loving groom. All thanks to the blind Greek (Berger) who, beyond the little tin tamata of a heart, offers the glorious visions he sees.

It's a story with a theme that encompasses time as a prism of past, present, and future, and all the vast things we can't predict, and the simple things we can, usually, take for granted. It gives voice to desperation's accompanying prayer/wish/hope that we could bend even just a small fraction of the prism to our will for those we love.

But early in the story, there's this
"My new sandals-look!...Maybe I bought them for my wedding, the one that didn't happen."

and this, the last comment by the blind Greek,
"The tama of a heart in tin was not sufficient. ...Another tama was needed, made this time not in tin but with voices."

Those lines changed the sad but wonderful story into a sad story wrapped in a bitterly sadder truth.

From the beginning I wondered why Berger elected to tell this story as a blind man's visions, rejecting any other narrator he could have chose. Berger himself was a lifetime thinker of the "black mountains" that blocked "the world from light." He was a philosophical realist who dedicated his life (and money and reputation) to effecting changes for humanity, a realist who knew his vision for a more just world was always against all odds.

I don't believe Ninon got her wedding. I don't believe the story was meant to be more than a creative vision of a how a wedding might take place for Ninon under those insurmountable circumstances but in a more humane world. It was a prayer to go along with the tama bought by her father. It was an empathetic response of a blind man's brief and profoundly sad conversation with Ninon's father and another snippet he overheard from Ninon herself. The extra prayer, no matter how vivid and earnestly desired, would have been as effective against AIDS as the tin tama, which is to say not at all.

The power of "To the Wedding" for me wasn't as some kind of overcome-all-odds romance that ends tragically, which many read that way. Instead, I found it was a shouting (throat tama) into humanity's ears, hearts, eyes, torso, and for the children (we are all children) about the suffering by those among us who made an ordinary miscalculation during a particular time of an unforgiving virus and when humanity at large wasn't known for its compassion (if it ever has been) to them.

And I could cry all over again. show less

This is a beautiful piece of writing, a sort of psychogeography crossed with memoir, in which John Berger explores places that are important to him at the same time as he engages with memories of people who were important to him. Here the dead are as active in Berger’s life and thoughts as the living. The opening encounter set in Lisbon wonderfully captures the tone that Berger wants to set. He is surprised to find his mother in this city that he loves. She too loved it and has chosen it show more as the place in which she and he can meet. His interactions with her are sensitive and instructive — she often chides him or reminds him not to be fanciful but always tell the truth in his writing. Which immediately has us wondering what truth he is conveying through this particular writing. Note: he is certainly not telling us that the dead walk the earth. Rather, it is the influence on us of people who may have died that remains operative.

The result is a fascinating, lyrical, and very human approach to memoir. So readable and yet almost uncomfortably intimate. Filled with history and esoteric facts, yet what will stay with you is his mother laughing as she must have when she was 17.

Warmly recommended. show less