Like a photographer with his camera, John Berger uses words to capture moments: preserving them, denying their inherent transience. A passing encounter, an almost unnoticed gesture, a brief pause--Berger observes and transcribes them, and in so doing uncovers the extraordinary heart of the ordinary. This collection of stories brings a richly imagined landscape of elusive and ephemeral moments into eloquent existence.
Photocopies: Encounters
and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle.
Learn more
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
As well known for his art criticism as his novels, which include Pig Earth and To the Wedding, John Berger brings a visual acumen to his prose. And as a Marxist living among French peasantry, his politics inform his writing as well. The three--visual art, Marxist politics, poetic fiction--combine in these stories, or rather "memory visions," in a most effective way. The resulting alloy is larger than the elements, a beautiful and lyrical collection of narrative strands, frugal and melancholoy in tone.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Taking on the themes of art, friendship and time's passage, Berger (To the Wedding) fashions brief shorts that subtly replicate the photograph's ability to preserve a transient moment. Berger's subjects include his familiar Parisian artists and French peasants, but there are unexpected detours?e.g., into Paul Klee's art ("Sheets of Paper Laid on the Grass") or the communiques of Subcommandante Marcos, leader of the Zapatista revolt in the Mexican state of Chiapas ("Subcommandante Insurgente"). Most of these spare stories revolve around a single, central detail or scene: deceptive small talk on a bus to Derry ("Passenger to Omagh") or a difficult calving on New Year's Day ("Two Men Beside a Cow's Head"). Only rarely does Berger's imagination fail to penetrate his subject's surface, as in his rhetorically sketched newswire image of a Russian girl fighting in the 1993 attempted parliamentary putsch ("A Young Woman Wearing a Chapka"). At his best, as in his meditations on Simone Weil's writing table ("A Girl Like Antigone") or his drawing of a young Ukranian pianist ("A Young Woman with Hand to Her Chin"), Berger captures all at once the facets of an object, a moment and a person. "Nothing should be lost or wasted," Berger writes in a eulogy for a villager, a claim that could stand as the epigraph to a book in which he frequently manages, through a few simple facts and words, to suggest a life.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
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
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliant Reproductions of Memory Through Prose,
By "botatoe" (Albany, NY) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Photocopies: Encounters (Paperback)
"Photocopies" is a collection of twenty-eight stories, together with a photograph and a drawing. None of the stories is more than a few pages. Each of the "stories" is a vivid prose rendering of a person or place that left a seemingly indelible impression on John Berger's acutely refined sense of seeing. It is a collection marked by a minimalist sensibility, but not the cold, sterile minimalism found in the writing of Samuel Beckett or Gordon Lish. It is, instead, the warm, heartfelt minimalism of a writer striving to capture the fleeting, but enduringly memorable, moments of a human life."Photocopies" opens not with a photocopy, but with a photograph: the blurred, poorly-lighted photograph of a man and a woman standing under a tree. It is a sort of introduction to the first story, "A Woman and Man Standing by a Plum Tree," where Berger relates his memory of a woman he once met at a reading in Madrid who then turned up, several years later, at his country home in France. The woman is not identified by name. She is in her thirties, an artist and photographer who makes her living by restoring frescoes. The woman brings along a primitive, home-made plywood camera and, at the end of her visit, takes a picture of the two of them together under a plum tree: "The two of us stood there facing the camera. We moved, of course, but not more than the plum trees did in the wind. Minutes passed. Whilst we stood there, we reflected the light, and what we reflected went through the black hole into the dark box. It'll be of us, she said, and we waited expectantly." Unlike the photograph, the story that accompanies it, and the other twenty-seven stories in the collection, are clear, precise, vividly-rendered pictures from John Berger's memory. In this sense, Berger's use of a blurred photographic image to introduce the collection is a bit of irony. Ordinarily, a photograph is considered a very exact image of a moment in time. In Berger's telling, however, the more exact image is found in Berger's memory and in the reproduction (or "photocopy") of that memory that is rendered in prose. "Photocopies" includes recollections of Henri Cartier-Bresson ("A Man Begging in the Metro") and Simone Weil ("A Girl Like Antigone"), as well as numerous unidentifiable, but memorable, friends and acquaintances of Berger. It also includes, in typical Berger fashion, insightful thoughts on drawing ("A Young Woman with Hand to Her Chin") and on the way that images of the body are influenced by local terrain and climate ("Island of Sifnos"). "Photocopies" is a stunning example of how a sensitive, perceptive observer can render a vivid image of the world in prose. In this sense, Berger's collection is a true work of art, a book that I highly recommend not only as entertaining literature, but as a text that merits close reading and careful study by writers and artists.
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Neural Net Hardcopy,
This review is from: Photocopies: Encounters (Paperback)
This is the first work that I have read by Mr. John Berger. Entitled, "Photocopies", it is a collection of 29 memories that he made more permanent by placing them in print. I don't know at what point a novella becomes a short story, or when the latter becomes something else again. Mr. Berger presents these 29 experiences in 180 pages, and while the number presented can be said to be great as measured by the little space they occupy, it would be an error to judge the quality of what they contain by their brevity.There are not many Authors who can skillfully execute short literary works. By their definition they allow comparatively short spans of space and reading time to take the reader where the Author has mapped his or her trip. So what level of skill and experience can make a reader enjoy and think when provided with only a handful of words? Quite high for the former, and lengthy for the latter I think. Not many writers can create a sentence that includes the work of both Donatello and Thelonius Monk to explain the achievement of a prison escape. The reader is also treated to metaphors that will become memories. Mr. Berger in describing the aged hands of a laborer could have slipped into cliché, or a variant on many others. However he compares the hands to, "certain old words that today are going out of use". This volume is a remarkable collection of thoughts, observations and memories that never exceed a few pages, and in one example consumes only a single leaf. Yet they are all of interest, they provoke thought, and they illustrate what results when skill, gifts, and life experience are placed on paper.
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"Photocopies" is profound,
By A Customer
This review is from: Photocopies: Stories (Hardcover)
"Photocopies" is profound. Like those "packed"files on computer software disks that unpack when you load the program, these brief pieces unpack in my mind. I can read only about two at a time because they are so satisfyin
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product).
|
