Finally,
a book that meets my personal requirements for a prizewinner! G., by John Berger, is original and
thought-provoking. It weaves together the personal and political, seamlessly
zooming in to sensual moments, then zooming out to international crises and national
overviews. It is a meta-fictional tour de force, and I am keeping this one.
You
see, I wasn’t planning on keeping all the Booker books that I took such pains
to accumulate. For the first four, I marked passages with sticky notes, so that
I could resell the books later. But I gave up on sticky notes on page 74 of G.
G.
is the unnamed protagonist, a boy who grows up in limbo as the child of an
affair, not knowing his father, rarely seeing his mother. This state, Berger
argues, is what primes him for falling in love precociously and repeatedly. He
becomes a sort of Don Juan; his first sexual experience is with his mother’s female
cousin who raised him. (This is not her first incest: she lives like a wife with
her male cousin, G.’s sole paternal figure until he is reunited with his
absentee father.)
I
love the close-up scenes of a boy discovering his body and others’ bodies,
pondering what is inside and what is outside. I am reminded of the sensuality
of Anais Nin and Henry Miller, and David Foster Wallace’s “Backbone,” about a
lonely boy who sets himself the goal of kissing every inch of his own flesh.
I
love how the story oscillates in a series of luminous vignettes from concrete
to abstract, with meta-fictional author’s asides that don’t seem contrived. Berger
makes observations on the role of hunting in the evolution of British socio-economic
class, then writes gorgeously about one evening’s hunt as lived by G. and his
male cousin.
I
may not agree with all his abstract generalizations, but I am fascinated with them.
His view of women, for example: that we are always surveying ourselves, seeing ourselves
through others’ eyes. I think Berger explains this better than certain French
feminists I studied, though I am not convinced that all women feel this way, or
that no men do.
The
episodes of seduction become more and more political until they spiral tightly
into one evening at a ball in Trieste, with not one but two women, just days
before World War I is declared. I did not feel the need to look up as much historical
information as I did in the previous Booker prize winners about politics and colonization, and
yet I did not feel lectured to, either.
Like
I said, G. is a keeper. I’ll be
looking up other books by John Berger when this project is complete.
Sounds fascinating!
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