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Sense of Sight

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It was a delight to return to John Berger's writings through this collection of essays. A few are previously unpublished and the rest date from 1960 to 1984. Old stuff? No. Some of the essays are timeless, those on art in particular. Some offer haunting pictures of a vanished world, travel pieces in Yugoslavia for example. And some are disturbing and dismaying for their current relevance. "On the Bosphorus" was written in 1979, just after the government of Turkey had declared martial law, again. Berger sets this story of modern Turkey, its people, and its politics, on a ferry across the Bosphorus carrying Anatolian, commuting workers, truck drivers and Kurdish porters. The impact of US intervention on Turkish politics appears in the details of lives situated in history and written on the bodies of Berger's fellow passengers and remembered friends. The essay that follows, "Manhattan," is eery for the juxtaposition, and the two engage the reader in a post-September 11th dialogue.
John Berger is an art critic who taught us another way of seeing 40 years ago, but his strength is in the relation between the visual and the verbal. He writes of the the stories told by works of art and fills his essays with pictures of particular. He is the story teller.

Sense of Sight is possibly the best place to start with the impressive breadth and depth of Berger's essay writing. For anyone new to Berger, this is clearly the place to start. Even though "Selected Essays" features a longer time frame and over 600 pages of writing, "Sense of Sight" contains many of the works that make "Selected" such a powerful collection.

Berger's subjects in "Sense", as Lloyd Spencer says in his intro, fall into a number categories: "travel and emigration, dreaming, love and passion, death, art as activity and artifact, and the relation between work in language and the physical labour which produces and reproduces the world." Berger's confidence in tackling this array of stories is buoyed by his abilities. Few writers today would even tackle such a variety of areas because few command Berger's ability to weave stories and ideas together in the same cloth with the same commitment to both threads.

Highlights include:

- "The Moment of Cubism": a powerful and accessible study of one of the most profound developments in painting
- "Leopardi": an introduction to a man Nietzsche considered the greatest prose writer of the 19th century
- "The Eaters and the Eaten": an intriguing study of food, class, and feasts
- "The Production of the World": Van Gogh's compulsion to bring his canvas and reality ever closer together, "so close that the stars in the night became maelstroms of light"
- "Dürer: a Portrait of the Artist": what two self-portraits of an unrivalled artist reveal about art, independence, and religion on the cusp of the modern era
- "Ernst Fischer: a Philosopher and Death": a moving recollection of the writer's passions, insights, and final days