Photocopies

John Berger uses words to capture a splendid array of moments, passing encounters, and unnoticed gestures - together they express a frieze in history as we near the end of the century, and Berger places us there within it. Through Berger's words we see a street performer achieve a stillness so profound it recalls death. We enter a room where Simone Weil once lived, and where her presence lingers unexpectedly. We watch a man whose youth was spent in the maze of the Gulag, now forced to leave the house he had always imagined for himself in the years of his imprisonment. A vagabond cyclist pedals into our line of sight: she sees the world as if through a moving window, flowers grow in her basket as though on a windowsill. Each "photocopy" is about someone for whom Berger felt a kind of love. In giving life to these moments that caught his heart, Berger gives us, involuntarily, an intimate yet elusive portrait of himself.

Year

1996

Language

English

Publisher

Vintage

Editions

2

Pages

192

ISBN

9780679755173

Data source: Wikidata