In 1972, at the age of forty-five, he had won the Booker Prize for his novel G., in which Don Giovanni and Garibaldi, sexual and political emancipation, coincide. None of this could altogether be forgiven.īerger was already famous, even notorious, when I met him in the mid-1970s. He was read in a multiplicity of languages. From his French mountainside he denounced injustices that were everywhere visible, even in his native land. Berger had not only escaped the confines of his British island but he had had the audacity to rise to fame before doing so. Upon his death in January 2017, many of Berger’s British obituarists, on both the right and the left, engaged in settling decades-old political or art world scores. I’d known Berger for more than forty years, and biographers, having amassed reams of information about a life, may render it in ways that make it unrecognizable to friends or family. When Joshua Sperling’s biography of John Berger arrived at my door, I approached it with trepidation. John Berger, circa 1966 photograph by Jean Mohr
0 kommentar(er)
