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.
John Berger is a novelist, storyteller, poet, screenwriter, and art critic. His previous books include the Into Their Labours trilogy (Pig Earth, Once in Europa, and Lilac and Flag), About Looking, and Ways of Seeing (all available in paperback from Vintage Books). He was awarded the Booker Prize for G. and received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Lannan Foundation. Born in England, he has for many years lived in a small rural community in France.
在看这本书以前看过伯格的《观看之道》,但远没有这本书那么惊艳,也许半自传体的体裁因为记忆、因为情感而显得厚重。 “里斯本是座忍耐之城,是一堆无法回答的问题和一堆昵称。”在他笔下,死去的母亲与里斯本交替出现,这座城市成了记忆的符号;在克拉科夫,他认出...
评分你来到我身后,用双手蒙住我的眼,要我猜你是谁…… 年逾八十的英国老头约翰·伯格曾说:“我认为一个写作的人,应该勤于见证身边正在发生的重要事情;即使书写所立即产生的力量,可能看似微不足道、或一时被人忽略,但不要顾虑这些,还是要写。“书写”有着一种非常潜沉的生...
评分一棵用金属支架造型的大树,他写为“人力的驯诱”。 他形容玩纸牌人的表情:精明又认命。 坐着不动的老妇:展示性的寂然不动。 母亲的步调:那是一个早已期待到达,期待坐下来的步伐。 慢慢寻找合适的字眼:咀嚼着,仿佛其中有个字包了一层软骨,得多嚼几回才能咽下。 那...
评分文/严杰夫 “我去过很多地方。我活过一些年头。……所有这些地方,都曾为其他旅行者探访过。”英国作家约翰•伯格在《约定》这部文集的开头写道。伯格的这句话让我想起美国怪才导演蒂姆•波顿的电影《大鱼》。 在那部影片中,濒死的父亲给儿子讲述自己一生的奇特历险,那...
评分约翰,你是真的老了。 老到那样一个地步,死亡已近在眼前,触手可摸,踏进去是一步,退回来也是一步,仿佛一重薄如蝉翼的帘幕,这面与那面,其实没有多少分别,是黄昏也是黎明,是永眠也是醒来。在这轻而薄的明昧之境,生命中的亡魂缓缓现身,你们交谈,偶或沉思,世界于是铺...
没看完????不喜欢
评分非常喜欢这种安静 娓娓道来的叙说方式 读的时候总让我想到读川端康成的感觉
评分非常喜欢这种安静 娓娓道来的叙说方式 读的时候总让我想到读川端康成的感觉
评分也就Lisboa比较有意思吧。
评分用几个虚构故事勾勒出的欧洲城市游记,我这种英语水平的人读起来吃力。
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