King: A Street Story. [Import] [Hardcover]

John. Berger (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 220 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon; 1st Edition. edition (1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0747542864
• ISBN-13: 978-0747542865
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)

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 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars King is the word, November 26, 1999

By 

"lexo-2" - See all my reviews

This review is from: King: A Street Story (Hardcover)

King was published in the UK without John Berger's name on the cover. You only found it on the copyright page and on the endpaper at the back. This is a typically self-effacing move by a writer who is far more interested in telling stories than promoting himself. King takes us further into the zones of the dispossessed than Berger has gone before, even in his stunning trilogy Into Their Labours. A bunch of people live on a patch of urban wasteland; the narrator, King, is a dog who talks, or possibly a man who behaves like (maybe even appears as, maybe even is) a dog. They scrounge what little money and comfort they can get, always keeping an eye out for the authorities. Berger has never ceased to write about the people most writers neither know nor care about; his voice (or rather voices), his authority and his compassion are unique. And it's maybe the best book ever written with a dog as narrator, too.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Another Wonder from Berger, June 2, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: King: A Street Story (Hardcover)

John Berger has always been on the cutting edge of language and ideas. He is a sort of exile from all the terminal hipness of literature. He is brave and provocative and he continually questions the order of things. He writes from a deep inner need, in order to say things all over again, as if they have never been told before. This novel, King, is a marvellous movement on from his novel "To the Wedding." It reads as a contemporary myth but I never once doubt the authenticity of voice -- which is strange, since the book is ostensibly narrated by a dog. Berger is in top form. Read this fiercely important book.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Person Could Not, February 9, 2001

By 

taking a rest - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: King: A Street Story (Paperback)

Mr. Berger uses man's best friend to describe the human existence of the homeless. The 24 hours of experiences the canine "King" relates, had to be told by an animal other than a human, it could not otherwise work. Man as an animal shares many commonalities with the rest of the animal kingdom. As time passes skills we thought unique to ourselves are becoming fewer, I would offer speech as an example. One only has to read of the care that Elephants treat their dead and dying, the ways they revisit their dead to understand that compassion too is something we have yet to master.

We can claim something that is unique to our group. We kill our own, we torture our own, we systematically exterminate and ethnically cleanse our own. And as King relates to us we lack the compassion for those we would prefer to ignore rather than to help. There is a moment when the act of dousing a sleeping man with gasoline and lighting him afire is described as the death of a heretic. King muses the heretic's crime, could it be he is poor?

This book can be easily dismissed as being nothing new and that perhaps is the point. We have become a group that is nearly impossible to shock, the youngest of our group now kill aimlessly, and older members kill the youngest with no more concern than swatting a insect. Those with power persecute the weak; it has become all but a sport.

Mr. Berger's book is important because it shows behavior that should be contemptible, but has become so common, so cliché, it is rarely even contemplated. He needed to use a dog to bring attention to a human problem because a person is not qualified to comment on how we behave.

An important book by a talented man who has lived a long life, and clearly is less than impressed with what he has seen.