Paperback, 336 pages
English language
Published Jan. 8, 1992 by Vintage.
In this luminous novel — winner of Britain's prestigious Booker Prize — John Berger relates the story of "G.," a young man forging an energetic sexual career in Europe during the early years of the last century. With profound compassion, Berger explores the hearts and minds of both men and women, and what happens during sex, to reveal the conditions of the Don Juan's success: his essential loneliness, the quiet cumulation in each of his sexual experiences of all of those that precede it, the tenderness that infuses even the briefest of his encounters, and the way women experience their own extraordinariness through their moments with him. All of this Berger sets against the turbulent backdrop of Garibaldi and the failed revolution of Milanese workers in 1898, the Boer War, and the first flight across the Alps, making G. a brilliant novel about the search for intimacy in history's private …
In this luminous novel — winner of Britain's prestigious Booker Prize — John Berger relates the story of "G.," a young man forging an energetic sexual career in Europe during the early years of the last century. With profound compassion, Berger explores the hearts and minds of both men and women, and what happens during sex, to reveal the conditions of the Don Juan's success: his essential loneliness, the quiet cumulation in each of his sexual experiences of all of those that precede it, the tenderness that infuses even the briefest of his encounters, and the way women experience their own extraordinariness through their moments with him. All of this Berger sets against the turbulent backdrop of Garibaldi and the failed revolution of Milanese workers in 1898, the Boer War, and the first flight across the Alps, making G. a brilliant novel about the search for intimacy in history's private moments.
A winding, intricate and deep painting of sexuality, gender and ownership. A brilliant, bizarre masterpiece that forgets what it is and when it exists often enough to be very memorable.
