Review by New York Times Review
OVER the past half-century John Berger has written some 30 volumes of fiction, poetry, journalism and essays; won the Booker and James Tait Black Memorial Prizes; and starred in the BBC series on which his seminal aesthetic text, "Ways of Seeing," is based. For all this, he is no belletrist. His way with language - I say this with deep regard - is too utilitarian to warrant that designation. In fact, for all their abundance and renown, his books have the peculiar quality of seeming to be only incidentally, only by the barest margin, books. Constructed of words, they yet wear their words lightly, almost reluctantly, as if they might as easily have been made of paint and canvas or, better yet, of clay and straw, mud and bone. None of which is to say Berger treats language lightly. His work feels wrought with a miniaturist's precision, a quality of gravely considered intimacy that might be taken for tenderness. But as he wrote in an early essay on poetry: "The boon of language is not tenderness. All that it holds, it holds with exactitude and without pity." This premium on exactitude can make for a strenuous ride. When reading a Berger novel, we are unable to forget the medium from which the art has been constructed. We never quite lose ourselves in the story; nor would Berger want us to. Persistently, sometimes insistently, he calls us back to an awareness of form, of invention, and through these to an awareness of the world in which we sit turning his pages the world and all its exigencies. His most recent novel, "From A to X: A Story in Letters," plays with form in several ways: from the trompe l'oeil cover, which suggests the object in hand is not a work of fiction but an actual dossier, to the preface, in which someone named John Berger explains that he has come into possession of three packets of letters "recuperated" from an abandoned prison. These missives were written by someone called A'ida ("if this is her real name") to her lover, "known as Xavier," jailed as a founding member of a "terrorist network." By telling us the letters are not in chronological order, by proposing that their contents may be written in code and by indicating places where the writing is illegible, Berger the author invites us to interact with, to co-create, the text, guessing at the meanings of words and phrases, pondering what might have happened in the interval between letters, and imagining the reasons some were never posted. But "invites" is too mild a term, and "cocreate" too academic. What he really does is charge the reader with the responsibility to join in. Even the most rudimentary details beg contemplation. The setting, for example, is not simply ambiguous; it's drunkenly peripatetic, seeming to lurch around the globe heedless of divisions in time and space. A'ida makes reference to ancient Assyria, Spain, Carthage and Romania, while Xavier, in notes scribbled on the backs of her letters, cites Venezuela, Bolivia, Paris, Moscow and Myanmar. The identities of the lovers are similarly hazy. A'ida uses Spanish and Arabic endearments ("Mi Guapo," "Ya Nour"), transcribes lines by a Turkish poet and cooks molokhiyya, an Egyptian dish. Xavier quotes the Uruguayan journalist Eduardo Galeano, Frantz Fanon, Hugo Chávez and Subcomandante Marcos, not to mention Cassandra Wilson and Johnny Cash. When A'ida addresses Xavier by a pet name that, she writes, translates in Greek as "chameleon," we might well wonder whether this is an encrypted message from one insurgent to another, or Berger's way of winking at us. Their enemy, too, remains hinted at, half glimpsed in nightmarishly casual snatches of prose. A'ida's letters refer to Humvees, F-16s, arms dealers and Uzis. In one she writes: "Last Wednesday, they came ... to search, interrogate and scare. Too many of them for us to count. Each one with guns and grenades." In another: "I was thinking about the missile that brought such havoc a week ago. Amongst others, Gassan the barber's house was destroyed." So who are they, these protean lovers, this A and X of the title, and who is it, what is it, they oppose? Are they simply a couple of proletarian Everymen, universal soldiers of the people's army? Well, yes and no. We never come to know them as fully as the lovers in other Berger novels - "To the Wedding," say, or "Lilac and Flag," which treads similar ground and has a more vividly realized plot. But neither are they rude archetypes, devoid of individuality. If they remain enigmatic, this feels less a result of abstraction than of prudence, as though elements of their story had to be suppressed. Czeslaw Milosz once wrote, "The true enemy of man is generalization." Berger has spent his life fighting this enemy; each of his books stands as an act of resistance against it. If we were to put a name to the menace A'ida and Xavier face, it might be something like generalization. At times Berger frames this menace in terms of global capital. "Delocalization," Xavier reflects in one of his prison cell notes, "refers not only to the practice of moving production and services to where labor is cheapest, but also to the plan of destroying the status of all earlier fixed places so that the entire world becomes a Nowhere, and a single liquid market." Berger is more effective when he puts it in human terms, as when A'ida tells of her neighbor, a young woman whose lover was "hauled out of bed by a patrol, taken to the River Zab and shot." Months later, this woman sees someone who bears an uncanny resemblance to her dead lover, and this sighting, far more than the original news of his murder, undoes her. In anguish, she screams at the sky: "If there wasn't only one Rami, if Rami wasn't unique, then he isn't dead! How can I mourn him if he isn't, isn't unique?" Elsewhere, A'ida hymns Xavier's singularity: "No other man is like you. Everything is made of the same stuff, and everyone is put together differently." Berger's insistence on the unique, on the particular, prevents the novel from becoming a polemic. He rails against the blind sweep of oppression while keeping his gaze firmly rooted on the human: on human hands, which A'ida sketches over and over again in her letters, and on human longing, which suffuses this work with pain and beauty. As a pharmacist, A'ida dispenses cures, "all of them intended to reduce suffering," but none can assuage her longing. For that she has only language, whose inadequacy she bemoans: "I don't know what words to use. The words are never there." But the selection of words that are intimate and specific - words of exactitude and without pity - constitutes an act of care. And as Berger has observed, "There is often nothing more substantial to place against the cruelty and indifference of the world than this caring." Even as A'ida laments their futility, words are what she continues to place against the separation imposed on her and her beloved. "Between the useless words," she promises, "you'll see what I saw." Leah Hager Cohen's most recent novel is "House Lights." 'The boon of language is not tenderness,' Berger wrote. 'All that it holds, it holds with exactitude and without pity.'
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
A'ida is a pharmacist and a dissident in a poor village in a dusty land under tyrannical rule enforced with tanks and Apache helicopters. She could be living her austere, attentive, stoic, and courageous life in North Africa, Spain, South America, or the Middle East. Xavier, her beloved, a rebel, is in prison, serving two life sentences. A'ida knows that his jailers read her letters to Xavier first, so she fashions letter-poems, lyric and coded, laced with dreams, fantasies, memories, and philosophical musings about justice, survival, the degradation of soldiers goaded into attacking civilians, and the covert messages of the body that defy surveillance, censorship, punishment. As for Xavier, he writes brief, factual comments on the deplorable state of the world on the back of A'ida's artful letters, the notes of a caged but unbowed resister. Returning to fiction after several essay collections, including Hold Everything Dear (2007), Berger, a writer of conscience, exquisite restraint, and tender sensuality, tells a beautifully sorrowful story of love, conviction, and defiance in a time of brutal indifference.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2008 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Berger is a Booker prize winner, art critic, journalist, essayist and the acclaimed author of Ways of Seeing. His latest is an epistolary novel that concerns two characters: Xavier, the alleged founder of a terrorist cell, and A'ida, his lover. The letters are A'ida's, written to Xavier over the course of his years of imprisonment and squirreled away in a corner of Xavier's small cell. They are adorned by Xavier's margin notes (ranging from political exclamations to quotations about love and longing) and A'ida's sketches. Through A'ida's letters, the reader gets a taste of daily life in the provincial village of Suse, where she works in a pharmacy. Though she puts on a happy face for Xavier, tanks and helicopters haunt the margins, and she drops coded hints that she may still be involved in the resistance. The letters are organized idiosyncratically, but by virtue of their disorder, Berger tanks the standard-issue long-distance love plot and instead provides a rich narrative that winds together the toll on a town besieged and of isolation on a romance; it's a paean to protest, both political and romantic. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
This short novel by Booker Prize-winning novelist Berger (G) takes the form of letters written by a woman to her jailed lover. A powerful sense of loss and longing hovers over these missives as A'ida describes to Xavier events in the town of Suse, including her work at the local pharmacy. Outbursts about the oppressive tactics of the regime that has upended both A'ida's and Xavier's lives emerge only occasionally and only in letters that she won't mail since the censors would never allow them to be posted. Xavier, whom she is not permitted to marry and is thus not able to visit, scrawls cryptic political messages on the backs of her letters. We come to recognize his heroism from these comments and from some references made by A'ida. But he is not the fully rounded character that she is. In her own quiet way, A'ida is a hero, too, steadfast and loyal to the man she will probably never see again. Deeply affecting is the portrait of her love, one of the few aspects of their lives that cannot be touched by tyranny. Recommended for all libraries.--Evelyn Beck, Piedmont Technical Coll., Greenwood, SC (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A novel comprised of a series of letters allegedly "recuperated" by Berger (Hold Everything Dear, 2007, etc.). The letters were supposedly found in Cell 73 of a recently abandoned old prison, a cell that had formerly housed Xavier, a political prisoner--though in civilian life a mechanic--incarcerated for "being a founder member of a terrorist network, and serving two life sentences." A'ida is deeply in love with Xavier, and her letters are filled with reflections on their relationship and on life in the town where she lives. They concentrate especially on her small circle of family and friends, and the people she meets in her profession as a pharmacist. Through her reminiscences we learn how she and Xavier met, and she relives through her letters the exhilaration of their early days together. We also witness how her relationship to Xavier deepens as she shares her observations and perceptions with her absent lover. Although Berger presents no correspondence from Xavier himself, we get the man's voice through philosophical musings written by Xavier on the back of A'ida's letters. While A'ida's letters tend toward the lovingly personal (though she also "digresses" into speculations about the mind/brain/body problem), Xavier's tend toward the political and put the nebulous actions for which he's been imprisoned into a larger framework of injustice and oppression. Alluding to Lorca, for example, he comments: "The day that hunger disappears the world will see a spiritual explosion such as humanity has never known." The tone of the novel ultimately becomes ever more ominous, and although planes begin to attack the village and some of A'ida's friends are killed, her love is strengthened through her loss and suffering. Berger's writing comes off as equal parts somber and exalted. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review