Read Selected Essays Page 73


  Leopardi

  1. Giacomo Leopardi, Moral Tales, trans. Patrick Creagh (Manchester: Carcanet, 1983; New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).

  A Story for Aesop

  1. Danilo Dolci, Sicilian Lives (New York: Pantheon, 1981), p. 171.

  2. José Ortega y Gasset, Historical Reason (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), p. 187.

  Sources

  Where no prior source is indicated, a piece is assumed to have been first published in book form. Otherwise the pieces were first published — sometimes with different titles, in different versions — as follows.

  Permanent Red

  All pieces first published in the New Statesman

  The Moment of Cubism

  The Moment of Cubism: New Left Review

  The Historical Function of the Museum, The Changing View of Man in the Portrait, Art and Property Now, Image of Imperialism, Nude in a Fur Coat, Mathias Grünewald, L. S. Lowry, Alberto Giacometti, Pierre Bonnard, Auguste Rodin: New Society

  The Painter in His Studio: Vermeer: Punch

  Et in Arcadia Ego: Poussin: New Statesman

  The Maja Dressed and The Maja Undressed: Goya: Sunday Times Magazine

  Toulouse-Lautrec: Observer

  Frans Hals: Sunday Times Magazine

  The Look of Things

  Peter Peri, Zadkine, Victor Serge, Walter Benjamin, Painting a Landscape, Understanding a Photograph, The Political Uses of Photo-Montage, The Sight of a Man, Revolutionary Undoing, Past Seen from a Possible Future, The Nature of Mass Demonstrations: New Society

  Le Corbusier, Drawings by Watteau, Thicker than Water: New Statesman Fernand Léger: Marxism Today

  The Booker Prize Speech: Guardian (24 November 1972)

  About Looking

  All previously published in New Society except:

  Between Two Colmars, Romaine Lorquet: Guardian

  Turner and the Barber’s Shop, Rouault and the Suburbs of Paris: Réalities

  The White Bird

  The Storyteller, On the Bosphorus, The Theatre of Indifference, The Hals Mystery, In a Moscow Cemetery, François, Georges and Amélie: A Requiem in Three Parts, Drawn to That Moment, The Eyes of Claude Monet, The Work of Art, The Hour of Poetry, Leopardi, The Production of the World: New Society

  The Eaters and the Eaten: Guardian

  Modigliani’s Alphabet of Love: Village Voice

  Ernst Fischer: A Philosopher and Death: Introduction to his autobiography, An Opposing Man: The Autobiography of a Romantic Revolutionary (New York: Liverlight, 1974)

  Mayakovsky: His Language and His Death: 7 Days

  The First and Last Recipe: Ulysses: Guardian

  Keeping a Rendezous

  Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye, The Soul and the Operator: Expressen

  That Which Is Held: Village Voice

  A Load of Shit, Imagine Paris, The Opposite of Naked, Drawing on Paper: Harper’s Magazine

  Mother: Threepenny Review

  A Story for Aesop: partly in Granta, partly in Village Voice Literary Supplement A Kind of Sharing, The Third Week of August, 1991: Guardian

  Christ of the Peasants: exhibition catalogue published by the Arts Council of Great Britain

  A Professional Secret: New Society

  Ape Theatre: Granta

  A Household: New Statesman & Society

  Erogenous Zone: El Pais

  A Note on the Editor

  Geoff Dyer’s first book, Ways of Telling, was a critical study of John Berger; since then he has published seven works of fiction and non-fiction, including But Beautiful, Out of Sheer Rage, (a finalist, in America, for a National Book Critics Circle Award), Paris Trance and, most recently, Anglo-English Attitudes, a collection of essays.

  ALSO BY JOHN BERGER

  CORKER’S FREEDOM

  This novel is the unforgettable, often comical portrait of a dreamer, one William Corker, the genteel proprietor of a London employment agency, who, in his sixty-third year, has just moved out of the house he shared with his overbearing sister. As Corker takes his first steps into a life of the passions, Berger creates a character of astonishing depth and liveliness.

  Fiction/Literature

  KING

  Beside the highway, in a wasteland furnished with smashed trucks and broken washing machines, lives a vagrant community of once hopeful individuals. Stealing meat from the butcher and sharing the warmth of his flesh, King, our canine narrator, bears witness to one couple’s vulnerability, endurance, and sacred history of better times.

  Fiction/Literature

  G.

  Winner of the Booker Prize, G. relates the story of a young man forging an energetic sexual career at the turn of the century. With profound compassion, Berger explores the hearts and minds of both men and women to reveal the conditions of Don Juan’s success: his essential loneliness, the culmination of his sexual experiences, the tenderness that infuses the briefest encounters, and the way women experience their own extraordinariness through him.

  Fiction/Literature

  A PAINTER OF OUR TIME

  An expatriate Hungarian painter named Janos Lavin has disappeared following a triumphant one-man show at a fashionable gallery. Lavin’s diaries—found, translated, and annotated by his friend John—suggest far more than the motives for his disappearance: they also reveal the ways in which a man may reconcile the solitary call of art with the demands of conscience.

  Fiction/Literature

  PHOTOCOPIES

  Encounters

  Berger presents a collection of moments, each supremely vivid, that make up a frieze of human history at the end of the millennium as well as a subtle and affecting self-portrait of their author. Using careful, intensely visual prose snapping frozen vignettes of life, these twenty-nine “photocopies” teach us about lying and self-invention, dignity and tenderness, charity and courage.

  Literature/Memoir

  TO THE WEDDING

  In To the Wedding, Gino and Ninon are getting married. Their stories—and those of Ninon’s mother and father—are told by a blind Greek peddler, who hears everything: waterfalls, the roar of a motorcycles, prayers, the chat of computer hackers, the music that Ninon will dance to on her wedding day. Here is a novel both tragic and joyous, intelligent and erotic, a transcendent celebration of passion.

  Fiction/Literature

  ALSO AVAILABLE:

  About Looking

  And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos

  Another Way of Telling

  Art and Revolution

  A Fortunate Man

  Keeping a Rendezvous

  Lilac and the Flag

  Once in Europa

  Pig Earth

  Selected Essays of John Berger

  Sense of Sight

  The Shape of a Pocket

  The Success and Failure of Picasso

  VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL

  Available wherever books are sold

  www.randomhouse.com

 


 

  John Berger, Selected Essays

 


 

 
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