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Photocopies: Encounters

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Photocopies: Encounters

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Overview

Berger presents a collection of moments, each supremely vivid, that together make up a frieze of human history at the end of the millennium as well as a subtle and affecting self-portrait of their author. Using careful, intensely visual prose snapping frozen vignettes of life, these twenty-nine "photocopies" teach us about lying and self-invention, dignity and tenderness, charity and courage. Overflowing with the sights, sounds, and smells of life, Photocopies is a masterpiece from one of the most important chroniclers of our time.

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Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307794338
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	07/13/2011
Series:	Vintage International
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	192
Sales rank:	1,040,197
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

John Berger was born in London in 1926. He is well known for his novels and stories as well as for his works of nonfiction, including several volumes of art criticism. His first novel, A Painter of Our Time, was published in 1958, and since then his books have included Ways of Seeing, the fiction trilogy Into Their Labours, and the novel G., which won the Booker Prize in 1972. In 1962 he left Britain permanently, and lived in a small village in the French Alps. He died in 2017.

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Editorial Reviews

Taking on the themes of art, friendship and time's passage, Berger (To the Wedding) fashions brief shorts that subtly replicate the photograph's ability to preserve a transient moment. Berger's subjects include his familiar Parisian artists and French peasants, but there are unexpected detourse.g., into Paul Klee's art ("Sheets of Paper Laid on the Grass") or the communiqus of Subcommandante Marcos, leader of the Zapatista revolt in the Mexican state of Chiapas ("Subcommandante Insurgente"). Most of these spare stories revolve around a single, central detail or scene: deceptive small talk on a bus to Derry ("Passenger to Omagh") or a difficult calving on New Year's Day ("Two Men Beside a Cow's Head"). Only rarely does Berger's imagination fail to penetrate his subject's surface, as in his rhetorically sketched newswire image of a Russian girl fighting in the 1993 attempted parliamentary putsch ("A Young Woman Wearing a Chapka"). At his best, as in his meditations on Simone Weil's writing table ("A Girl Like Antigone") or his drawing of a young Ukranian pianist ("A Young Woman with Hand to Her Chin"), Berger captures all at once the facets of an object, a moment and a person. "Nothing should be lost or wasted," Berger writes in a eulogy for a villager, a claim that could stand as the epigraph to a book in which he frequently manages, through a few simple facts and words, to suggest a life. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Have you ever looked at a photograph and wondered about the lives of the people captured in the camera's lens? Berger, noted art critic and Booker Prize-winning author of To the Wedding (LJ 5/1/95), gives the reader just this kind of glimpse in his new collection of stories. In "A Man Begging in the Metro" he writes, "Photography... is a spontaneous impulse which comes from perpetually looking, and which seizes the instant and its eternity." The characters in each of his vignettes seems to have full and rich lives outside and beyond the confines of their stories, and Berger has given us just a taste of them. Few of the stories are conventionally plot-driven. Instead, they read like meditations on the juxtaposition of life and art. For literary collections.Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, Univ. of Idaho Lib., Moscow

Library Journal

Featherlight touches and resonant phrasing have been Berger's stock in trade through his extensive career as novelist and critic (To the Wedding, 1995, etc.). This collection of short fictions (many, apparently, drawing heavily on the particulars of Berger's long life) is no exception, though these vignettes are colored with a pervasive melancholy that works as often to their detriment as to their advantage.
"Sometimes it seems that, like an ancient Greek, I write mostly about the dead and earth." This sentiment, which begins "A Friend Talking," a short, poignant piece on the death of an artist in Paris, typifies the air of bittersweet remembrance cloaking the book as a whole. Another friend, a survivor of the Gulag living outside of Paris in a Le Corbusier house, is being forced in old age to leave the home where his mother waited for 14 years for him to return from Siberia ("A House Designed by Le Corbusier"). A visit with photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson triggers a wide- ranging conversation on art and images ("A Man Begging in the Métro"), while a visit in high summer to an artist living in Galicia ("Sheets of Paper Laid on the Grass") involves looking at her primordial mollusc-inspired drawings, which invoke the work of Paul Klee. Other visits range from a trip to the Italian hills to see the crumbling ancestral home outside of which a friend's mother has recently planted a single jasmine, to yet more visits with painters, usually friends of long acquaintance. The cumulative effect of these special events, both sad and satisfying, is a gentle yet persistent distancing, a refinement of memory's moments into acts of archetypal sharing.
With so clear a focus on death and detachment, it's hard not to see this collection as a sort of letting go—though not, one hopes, a cap on the career of so keen an observer and grandly gifted a writer.

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