JOHN BERGER - G.

Image: early flyers

A bar in Neukölln, Berlin, 2 AM: I’m reading this book, killing time before a later engagement, when a group of neighborhood cardplayers invite me to set aside my reading and join their game. They are lifelong friends, at ease with one another, and curious about me; one picks up G., reads the jacket copy, and scoffs. “Imagined sex in the imagined Europe of old — what a cliché.” I had fallen for the cliché. And I maintain that, from a marketing perspective, the jacket copy of G. is outstanding. But my new friend had a point. Europeans of the past had no privileged insight to sex. And for a novel that purports to be about sex, G. Is not a sexy story. Writerly digressions (on the nature of representation, metaphor, the writing life, etc.) do no favors for the mood. I preferred the stretches of the narrative where Mr. Berger submits to the traditional pleasures of character and scene. Read, September 2019.