JOHN BERGER: From Life, and what a life it was!

JOHN BERGER: From Life
TOM OVERTON
Verso Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A magisterial biography of novelist and critic John Berger, whose work—including Ways of Seeing and the Booker-prize winning G.—revolutionized the critical tradition in the twentieth century

John Berger (1926–2017) served in Britain’s wartime army before attending art school. The young artist became a critic and broadcaster, cutting a swathe through the staid world of post-war Britain, demanding political engagement in all things. In 1972, he came to prominence with Ways of Seeing, a TV series and book that inspired generations to look more closely and think more deeply about art.

Committed to the passionate exploration of life in all its forms, unbounded by convention, he applied himself to a panoply of genres, media, and subjects. His career defies definition. His work reimagined the relationship between art and society; human and animal; living and dead. He charted the disappearance of peasants from the world; documented migrant labour; explored the AIDS crisis; and was trenchantly opposed to the new world order that emerged in the 1990s, as he was to the War on Terror that followed. Berger was deeply and vocally committed to the Palestinian cause.

Through working on Berger’s archive at the British Library and fifteen years of getting to know his family, friends, lovers, and collaborators, Tom Overton has produced a portrait of an artist and storyteller who defined and transcended his times.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: First, read this:

You lived through enough zeits for there to be many geists.Ways of Seeing is part of a moment of experiment with televisual equipment all around the world, from The Hour of the Furnaces in Argentina, Nam June Paik in America, to Harun Farocki and Cristina Perincioli in Germany. Not experiments your producer...remembered knowing anything about.

A friend writing his friend's biography either is wielding one of the Long Knives in anticipation of the famously horrible Night of them returning, or is barely stopping short of a public act of fellation. The staccato rhythm of the above sentence supports either interpretation in its sibylline recounting of Berger's wide field of cultural vision.

Considering how many, many, many coital acts are presented as factual in this extended celebration of the interesting and salacious life of a man who thought deeply and was very willing to detail the trails his thought had brought him down. An artist, a Booker-winning novelist, a public intellectual with a strong leftist bent...he created the riposte to Kenneth Clark's deeply conservative and Eurocentric Civilisation, Ways of Seeing, in the same year he won the Booker...a career highlight for anyone, even a wunderkind polymath who never left the cultural radar after exhibiting paintings in the post-War gallery scene of London until his death as a grand old man of Culture in France in 2017.

Author Overton has worked on and with Berger, his children, and his archives on multiple fronts. It's expertise one feels as the story of John Berger, polymath and bounder, unspools. His 1972 Booker acceptance speech...well...what a moment. It's a master class in how to make a statement as a principled person, while using the system's kindness against its failings and cruelties to others. As one would expect, there are illustrations, though goodness knows there could be an entire photo essay on John Berger's œuvre.

I hope a few of y'all, who have not heard of Berger before, will discover him; and the rest of us who remenber some bits and fragments of his art(s) career will gain insight and context on him, on how he came to think, and what he came to mean to a world that had then and has now a limited attention span for those who don't think outside the box.

They disassemble it, reuse the best bits, and chuck aside the dross with both hands.

JANE'S COUNTRY YEAR, another Handheld Classics reissued delight

JANE'S COUNTRY YEAR
MALCOLM SAVILLE
Handheld Classics
$19.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The first edition since 1946, with full colour illustrations throughout.

'At last she reached the brow of the hill ... now the country opened out below her and she looked down into a wide and lovely valley ... Still patched with snow the little fields spread like a carpet below her and here and there a farmhouse with barns and golden ricks was clearly seen. Across the plain ran, straight as a ruler, a railway line and she saw a toy train puffing and crawling across the picture.'

Malcolm Saville's classic novel is about eleven-year old Jane's discovery of nature and country life during a year spent convalescing on her uncle's farm, after having been dangerously ill in post-war London. This deeply-felt novel was written while Saville was extending his range as a writer, alongside his very successful Lone Pine adventure series, and nature anthologies for children. Inspired by the experiences of Saville's own god-daughter, this marvellous novel is full of the wonder of discovery, as well the happiness of regaining health, making friends, and learning to love the natural world. The novel is also a record of rural England eighty years ago, written by one of the great twentieth century English nature writers.

The Introduction is written by Hazel Sheeky Bird of the University of Newcastle. The illustrations by Bernard Bowerman have been reproduced from the first edition.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: A quiet, gentle read for your tween-years reader. Beautiful reprint edition of a very prolific author for children's post-WWII novel. It follows Jane, a young girl recuperating from a serious illness at her aunt and uncle's farm in rural England. The framing device is, I know you'll know from the off, an excuse to write an elegy for the rural life that generations of people around the world were abandoning in increasing numbers as the world adjusted to new realities.

The text is, of course, not telling you this directly. It's a very sweet, very detailed love-letter to a vanishing time as it faded away. The reason it is interesting to read now is the world is rediscovering a need, once amply fulfilled, to recognize and relate our lives to the rhythms of the natural world. We do our descendants a service by giving them books of this sort. The way that urban outsider Jane comes to understand and treasure this world and its beauties and cycles is edifying without feeling condescending.

A kid today will read this with a sense of shock, I think, that this was ever a way of life that millions followed. It is clearly written and, while there are people winking in it, they are doing so from adult to child, so it's revoltingly condescending but not unexpected. The kind of folk who lived this life at that distant time:

...would have done the w-verb without thinking a thing of it. *shudder* The good old days, they were rotten.

The Introduction by Hazel Sheeky Bird is a wondeful overview of Saville's extended career as a writer for tweens and teens. It makes the book suitable for adults nostalgic for an earlier way of life by contextualizing it in its social milieu. I guess most of the people I'd gift it to, those between 11 and 14, will skip past that essay. If you were old enough to remember the Coronation, or the Rosenberg case, this book with Introduction will very likely hit every last nostalgia bump on your noggin.

Gifted to yourself or a younger reader, one who is beginning to wonder about the natural world around them, this novel of self-discovery, and family love, and the cycle of the seasons embedding them all, will hit a high note for #Booksgiving.