Customer Reviews

Here Is Where We Meet

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John Berger's new "fiction" (to use his term) persuades me to think of the book as perhaps his last; it is a book of retrospection (without rue, yet truthful to loss), inhabited by ghosts and memory. Its view is broad, its format almost playful: a tour of places the speaker has visited, or rather, a return to those places via memory. Although the chapters/essays feature the usual (but thoroughly unique) observations that seem to unite the metaphysical with the concrete, there is a new tonal element here -- a poignancy, a sweet melancholia at times, tinted by fatal shadows. Berger is now eighty. You will think of Berger's novel TO THE WEDDING when you read his eighth chapter of his new book, which occurs in Poland. You will think of his art criticism and other essays when you read his lines on cave paintings in France. Berger has always reminded us that memory and history are frequently at odds -- and that the action of memory (circular, returning) refreshes and excites us, while history (persuading us that life is linear, the present always replaceable) works against the eternal, the simple, and the deep. Berger's writing style -- notable for its sure tonal handling, its economy and modesty, and its narrative and descriptive power -- is here at its best.

"Why did you never read any of my books?"

"I liked books which took me to another life. That's why I read the books I did. Many. Each one was about real life, but not about what was happening to me when I found my bookmark and went on reading. When I read, I lost all sense of time."

Eighty-year-old John Berger has written plenty of literary works, ranging from poetry and essays to screenplays and novels. His "Into Their Labours" trilogy (PIG EARTH, ONCE IN EUROPA, and LILAC AND FLAG) and book WAYS OF SEEING have both received worldwide recognition, and he was awarded the prestigious Booker Prize for his novel, G. Born in England and currently living in a small village in France after countless years of travel, Berger is certainly an international man of letters and this itinerant influence and well-educated lifestyle permeate his work.

In his latest novel, HERE IS WHERE WE MEET, Berger continues to act the part of a hospitable chaperone. In a series of stories and essays that are tenuously linked yet can stand alone as individual musings, Berger guides his readers from one city to the next, from Lisboa and Genève to Islington and Le Pont d'Arc. Through his words, we are able to experience the heat of the African streets, the dark solitude of a French Cro-Magnon underground cave, and the bustling frenzy of a Polish marketplace. In each venue, we are introduced to past and present family members, loves, and complete strangers --- all with interesting stories to tell and all making an impact in their own quiet way.

In the first story, "Lisboa," John (the narrator) stumbles across his mother --- a vision of her, perhaps --- who died fifteen years earlier. Over the course of fifty or so pages, she and he explore the city and talk about living, death, and everything in between. She shares with him, as Berger shares with us, a philosophy on how to appreciate what you have both in life and in death: "Everything in life, John, is a question of drawing a line, and you have to decide for yourself where to draw it. You can't draw it for others. You can try, of course, but it doesn't work. People obeying rules laid down by somebody else is not the same thing as respecting life. And if you want to respect life, you have to draw a line."

In the story entitled "Genève," we travel to the city of the same name --- a city that is "contradictory and enigmatic as a living person...sexy and secretive." Here, in one of John's side anecdotes, we meet the legendary writer Jorge Luis Borges and are privy to his first humiliating boyhood experience with a prostitute. A moment later, we are brought back to the present and treated to a glimpse into John's trip to Genève with his daughter, Katya. During their stay, the two pay a visit to Borges's grave sight and, in doing so, rediscover the writer's curious and passionate native city firsthand.

In these and the rest of the seven offerings included in HERE IS WHERE WE MEET, John bares a close resemblance to Berger in that he is around the same age and shares the same temperament and voice. In his storytelling, he is both unassuming and contemplative, with frequent and somewhat disjointed reflections and observations peppered throughout. Almost as if he is talking into a tape-recorder in order to document his wanderings and create an audible travelogue, John relates his experiences with authority and grace, allowing the reader to enjoy these experiences as he himself would experience them.

Overall, HERE IS WHERE WE MEET is an enjoyable collection for those who are interested in skimming the surface of many locales and time frames, and forming their own opinions about what they encounter. For those who are looking for an in-depth journey or actual story, with solid characters, linear plots and subplots that are firmly grounded in reality, and an all-inclusive message, I would suggest looking elsewhere. It is clear that Berger ("John") has traversed many borders and boundaries in his long life, and it is possible that this latest "Fiction" might just be his way of summing up his physical, mental and emotional voyages for the more neophyte travelers and dedicated readers.

--- Reviewed by Alexis Burling

In HERE IS WHERE WE MEET, John Berger says: "Desire has been the cause of all my wounds, yet life without wounds isn't worth living. Desire is brief - a few hours or a lifetime, both are brief. Desire is brief because it occurs in defiance of the permanent. It challenges time in a fight to the death."

This wonderful work - whether it is a novel, autobiography, self-eulogy, self-elegy, or just a collection of essays - displays Berger's lifelong facility to deal with the elusiveness of desire. The memories of cities and people and foods are all ghosts of this desire and are beautifully spread out for the reader to enjoy.

This is a book that challenges one not to get inside the tale, not to see with the author's eyes, not to believe in the ghosts of his past. A challenge once unheeded, best taken at full advantage.

At one point the young speaker's mentor says: "If you have to cry, he said, and sometimes you can't help it, if you have to cry, cry afterwards, never during! Remember this. Unless you're with those who love you, only those who love you, and in that case you're already lucky for there are never many who love you--if you're with them, you can cry during. Otherwise you cry afterwards."

This book did not tug on my emotions until after I finished reading.

Reading Berger is a bit like the remembrances that fuel and ignite his story telling... each book adds to our memory, as his story and telling evokes our own. Over the years I've collected such memories via Berger in sporadic and varied settings, and they lay now in various chambers of my heart, like pressed flowers with a few lines of poetry, or a photo that reminds me of a time, and how it felt behind the memory I carry of that time... and this book fits into this telling of a life, merging with Life, seamlessly.

Like my favorites of his (Pig Earth and To the Wedding) the writing here glides over simple stories, yet includes at some phase (a culminating phase) a subtle and transfixing tale that hovers on the edge of our ability to tell, and be told, the delicate balance that is living. It transforms from the narrative into the timeless.

This book ends with a series of aphorism-like sentences that have the impact of childlike discovery and old-age memory wrapped into an indivisible whole... and makes an art that is more than literature or words, but includes, drawing, painting, sculpture, song, music and dance. It is an art that recognizes the unity of all experience and wisdom....

"Everywhere there's pain. And, more insistent and sharper than pain, everywhere there's a waiting with expectancy."

And,

"Smiles invite to happiness, but they don't reveal to what kind."

And,

"Of human attributes, fragility - which is never absent - is the most precious."

One of best books written on reminiscence and time.

The book has stayed with me after I have finished reading it. And I am sure it is here to stay with me for long by raising questions and ideas of all sort.

It is simply marvelous.