Here Is Where We Meet: A fiction [Hardcover]

John Berger (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 9, 2005

One of the most widely admired writers of our time returns us to the captivating play and narrative allure of his previous novels—G. and To the Wedding among them—with a shimmering fiction drawn from chapters of his own life.

One hot afternoon in Lisbon, our narrator, John, finds his mother, who had died fifteen years earlier, seated on a park bench. “The dead don’t stay where they are buried,” she tells him. And so begins a remarkable odyssey, told in simple yet gorgeous prose and with the openness to personal and political currents that has always marked John Berger’s work.

Having promised his mother that he will henceforth pay close attention to the dead, John takes us to a woman’s bed during the 1943 bombardment of London, to a Polish market where carrier pigeons are sold, to a Paleolithic cave, to the Ritz Hotel in Madrid. Along the way, we meet an English aristocrat who always drives barefoot, a pedophile schoolmaster, a Spanish sculptor who cheats at poker, and Rosa Luxemburg, among other long-gone presences, and John lets us choose to love each of them as much as he still does.

This is a unique literary journey in which a writer’s life and work are inseparable: a fiction but not a conventional novel, a narration in the author’s voice but not a memoir, a portrait that moves freely through time and space but never loses its foothold in the present, a confession that brings with it not regret but a rich deepening of sensual and emotional understanding.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Lisbon is to Mother as Geneva is to Borges? Berger's elegiac gathering of semi-autobiographical vignettes seems at first to propose an elegant, somewhat chilly game of linking European cities to their dead. But as the table of correspondences broadens to include a formerly unhip London neighborhood, a French Cro-Magnon cave site, two rivers at opposite ends of a continent and a woman nicknamed Clarinette, it gets harder and harder to identify which of Berger's equally vivid characters exists only in memory. Most poignantly, in a section centered on the tiny Ching and Szum rivers of England and Poland as remembered by his father, Berger juxtaposes a boyhood spent at the edges of his father's WWI trauma with a contemporary portrait of a friend from Galicia, Danka, who lives exuberantly, meets her husband-to-be in Paris and gives birth to a son, Olek; threaded throughout are Berger's preparations as he cooks for their visit. Berger (Ways of Seeing) will be 80 next year; a mammoth collection of his essays was published in 2001. With its clarity and beautifully proportioned contours of fictive memory, this book makes the perfect site to encounter Berger for the first or 50th time. (Aug. 9)
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From The New Yorker

It is not always easy to tell, in the work of John Berger, where fiction meets autobiography-or, for that matter, essay and meditation. His latest book takes the form of encounters the author has with characters from the past-Jorge Luis Borges, Rosa Luxemburg, mentors, tutors, and lovers-in cities across Europe, from Lisbon and Madrid to Geneva and Krak—w. One by one, the apparitions turn up, artfully and reverentially sketched, before vanishing again with just the whisper of a message left behind. In Lisbon, city of trams and azulejos, Berger encounters the spirit of his long-departed mother and reflects, "Perhaps Lisbon is a special stopover for the dead, perhaps here the dead show themselves off more than in any other city."
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon; 1ST edition (August 9, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375423362
• ISBN-13: 978-0375423369
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.9 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #981,810 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

John Berger was born in London in 1926. He is well known for his novels and stories as well as for his works of nonfiction, including several volumes of art criticism. His first novel, A Painter of Our Time, was published in 1958, and since then his books have included the novel G., which won the Booker Prize in 1972. In 1962 he left Britain permanently, and he lives in a small village in the French Alps.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Poignant and Perceptive, October 28, 2005

By 

I, Reader (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Here Is Where We Meet: A fiction (Hardcover)

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.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A summing up of Berger's physical, mental, and emotional voyages, September 1, 2005

By 

Bookreporter (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Here Is Where We Meet: A fiction (Hardcover)

"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

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Crying Afterwards..., February 19, 2007

By 

John Conner "part-time professional student" (Lake Orion, Michigan USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Here Is Where We Meet: A fiction (Hardcover)

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.