[KO1]⋙ Libro Gratis G John Berger 9780747529088 Books

G John Berger 9780747529088 Books

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G John Berger 9780747529088 Books

I ordered this book and the version that arrived was clearly a cheap, unauthorized amateur reprint. It literally looked like it had been printed on someone's home 1990s laser jet printer. I exchanged it and one day later, I received the same fake cheap book. Garbage.


Tags : G [John Berger] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. This novel centres on G, who seems impervious to everything around him. His interests are purely sexual,John Berger,G,Trafalgar Square,0747529086,Fiction

G John Berger 9780747529088 Books Reviews

What is fascinating about this book is how Berger tells the story of the modern Don Juan (Don Giovanni) from the perspective of the seduced. Instead of telling the heroic tail of the 'conquests,' Berger focuses on the reception of seduction. Rather, seduction is a two-way street. "He" is the seducer--but so are his partners. They all come with interesting stories.
The 'protagonist' is uninteresting; he's not even all that attractive. Yet, Berger isn't all that interested in why G. would be attractive for so many women. Here there are no heroes and no victims. In sex there is the encounter of two 'who' they are isn't reducible to status and power; rather, it is the activity of anticipation, the clamouring, the lust, the mutual surrender, and the tenderness of fleeting moments.
Such moments are told against the backdrop of an astute historical understanding of the role of the sexes. Berger obliterates our preconceptions of sex-roles, our unconscious historical memories, by focusing on the mutual nature of passion.
Bloody hell. The idiotic hoops you have to go through to post a review of this book are beyond asinine. "Predictable--Some Twists--Full of Surprises." You have to click one before writing the review. It gets worse...

In any case, the book, like all Berger, should be read. He's a rare gem of contemporary literature and art criticism.

But the print quality of this edition is crap. Buy a different edition.
This dense, philosophical Booker Prize-winning novel of ideas took six years to write. Appearing in 1972, it follows the amorous adventures of an Italian-English gentleman as he seduces, from a predictably precocious age, many women. Yet, this Don Juan, for me, lacks appeal. His encounters, recounted by an intrusive and omniscient narrator, intersperse with eloquent meditations on sexuality, eroticism, love, and desire as a construct trapping or freeing men and women in late 19th and early 20th century Europe.

Berger's mix of reflection and fiction may not flow lightly, but it moves often dazzlingly. The distance that the author places between himself and "G" serves to keep the reader apart from the characters, and G's lovers come and go suddenly, without conventional seductions followed by affairs ended by breakups. You get their couplings in fragmented, often very evocative and momentarily graphic depictions. But, without the aftermath, what accrues are episodes from G.'s love life, mixed with narrative reflection, historical and political mini-essays, and an account of the times from both a bourgeois and a proletarian perspective.

The result's better cited in its prose, so below I give examples of Berger's success. While I found many parts uninvolving, such as Chavez' first flight over the Alps, the accounts of rebellions and the WWI glimpses held my attention much more, not to mention many sensuous moments. But, this novel, in its fragmented nature and editorial intrusion, may put off readers rather than get them off.

It's a heady experience, nonetheless, for the more intellectually minded reader wanting philosophy mixed with affairs if not of the heart than of the groin. By entering this disturbing, powerful, and unsettlingly limned realm, Berger tries to demythologize romance. He offers instead an analysis in fiction and speculation of how it takes place, emerging from within the society of a hundred years ago. Less concerned with character and even plot, G. as protagonist and his antagonists may not grip you as much as the vignettes of passion whether in fighting on the street or coupling in the boudoir. It may be an exchange you are willing to accept, in return for so many thoughts about sex, death, desire, and longing so well told.

1898 Milanese workers' rebellion "On the road between the soldiers and the barricade, absolutely still, are the seven stones that have fallen short." (74) "A cubic metre of space; empty it of your conception of that space; what remains is death."

The body "The process of maturing and, later, of ageing involves a gradual but increasing withdrawal of the self from the exterior surface of the body." (84)

"The focus of sexual desire is concentrated and sharp. The breast may be seen as a model of such focus, gathering from an indefinable, soft variable form to the demarcation of the aureola and, within that, to the precise tip of the nipple." (110) "All generalizations are opposed to sexuality." (111)

The narrator's method "I write in the spirit of a geometrician. One of the ways in which I establish co-oridnates extensively is by likening aspect with aspect, by way of metaphor. I do not wish to become a prisoner of the nominal, believing that things are what I name them. On the bed they were not such prisoners." (137)

"For the nineteenth century European middle classes the state of being in love was characterized by an excessive uncertainty in an otherwise certain world. It was a state exempt from the promise of Progress." (151)

Speaking of the components of sexual desire, Berger finds some "violently nostalgic," reaching back to birth; others leap ahead to the unknown threshold of our annihilation. At the moment of orgasm these points in time, our beginning and our end, may seem to fuse into one. When that happens everything that lies between them, that is to say our whole life, becomes instantaneous. It is thus I explain the protagonist of my book to myself." (142)

Camille, one of his mistresses just before her first union with G. "I have as many hairs on the back of my neck as you may have ways of touching me." (202) "Undressing was the act of shedding the interests of those who make up the interests of her life. With her clothes she discarded the men he hates." (203)

"Von Hartmann argued that his wife's adventures and extravagances should be appraised in their special relation to her lifetime with him. The licenses he had granted her had to be so graduated that she did not exhaust the possibilities of his compliance until she was too old to find another man." (257) Jamesian style echoes?

Trapped by our time "Certain experiences cannot be formulated because they have occurred too soon. This happens when an inherited world-view is unable to contain or resolve certain emotions or intuitions which have been provoked by a new situation or an extremity of experience unforeseen by the world-view." (104)

The final pages "Perhaps death when it arrives is always a mounting surprise which surprises itself to the point at which all reference--and therefore all self-distinction--disappears." (315) "The horizon is the straight bottom edge of a curtain arbitrarily and suddenly lowered upon a performance." (316)
I found the author's thoughts to be quite confusing and this book therefore difficult to read. Couldn't get through to the end which is unusual for me
John Berger’s prose moves magisterially through a number of cohesive and well-wrought registers in this beautiful novel, where the historical and the individual unite in highly unusual fashion. This is the story of “G,” a latter-day Don Juan who conquers women just as rapidly as the century seems to incline towards disenchantment. While perhaps not as capable of integrating the many elusive moments of G’s private life with the larger historical backdrop as Berger had hoped, this is still a wonderful, beautifully rendered work. Perhaps the significant accomplishment here, is the extraordinary way in which Berger is able to modulate between person and voice, seamlessly, like a painter in full command of his heterogeneous objects in a dim still life.
I can't believe how such a boring, uninteresting, and extremely irritating book could win the Man Booker Prize. I've had already some unpleasent experiences with it. but this book completely shatterered my confidence, I'll never trust the Man Booker Prize again!
It always seemed to me that the task of novel writing included a cohesive development of a long story. However, in this particular case, a very talented and intelligent author delivered a pastiche of fragments of varied length and often rather questionable quality. I found the reading process extremely exhausting. If you are looking for a well-paced and intelligently written narrative don't read this book. It gets a little better around page 140 when you are just about ready to give up. However, it doesn't lead anywhere. I am a very tolerant reader (some fragments of the books are actually even interesting and the writing itself actually consistently intelligent, alhtough often too dense) but as a novel this book is a complete disaster. It should be called "G. An Awkwardly Disjointed Pastiche About a Sex Addict and Politics". Not a novel.
I ordered this book and the version that arrived was clearly a cheap, unauthorized amateur reprint. It literally looked like it had been printed on someone's home 1990s laser jet printer. I exchanged it and one day later, I received the same fake cheap book. Garbage.