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by: John Berger
List Price: $24.00Amazon.com's Price: $16.32 You Save: $7.68 (32%)Prices subject to change.
Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN: 9780375423369
ISBN: 0375423362
Label: Pantheon
Manufacturer: Pantheon
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 256
Publication Date: August 09, 2005
Publisher: Pantheon
Release Date: August 09, 2005
Sales Rank: 666624
Studio: Pantheon
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
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.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating: - Crying Afterwards...
In HERE IS WHERE WE MEET, John Berger says: "Desire has been the cause of all my wounds, yet life without wounds isn't worth living. Desire is brief - a few hours or a lifetime, both are brief. Desire is brief because it occurs in defiance of the permanent. It challenges time in a fight to the death."
This wonderful work - whether it is a novel, autobiography, self-eulogy, self-elegy, or just a collection of essays - displays Berger's lifelong facility to deal with the elusiveness ... Read More
Rating: - Poignant and Perceptive
John Berger's new "fiction" (to use his term) persuades me to think of the book as perhaps his last; it is a book of retrospection (without rue, yet truthful to loss), inhabited by ghosts and memory. Its view is broad, its format almost playful: a tour of places the speaker has visited, or rather, a return to those places via memory. Although the chapters/essays feature the usual (but thoroughly unique) observations that seem to unite the metaphysical with the concrete, there is a new tonal element ... Read More
Rating: - J. Berger is as good as ever
One of best books written on reminiscence and time.
The book has stayed with me after I have finished reading it. And I am sure it is here to stay with me for long by raising questions and ideas of all sort.
It is simply marvelous.
Rating:  - A summing up of Berger's physical, mental, and emotional voyages
"Why did you never read any of my books?"
"I liked books which took me to another life. That's why I read the books I did. Many. Each one was about real life, but not about what was happening to me when I found my bookmark and went on reading. When I read, I lost all sense of time."
Eighty-year-old John Berger has written plenty of literary works, ranging from poetry and essays to screenplays and novels. His "Into Their Labours" trilogy (PIG EARTH, ONCE IN EUROPA, and ... Read More
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