From Publishers Weekly
Reprinted in the wake of his success with the Into Their Labours trilogy, Berger's 1964 novel (written eight years before the Booker Prize-winning G , and being issued in the U.S. for the first time) describes a day in the life of a man bent on breaking with his past. Sixty-three-year-old London employment agency owner Corker is Berger's Leopold Bloom--a man plagued by the conviction that he hasn't done enough with his life and who is now determined to free himself from a narrow existence. Blind to all but his need to make some sort of heroic gesture, he begins a fractured odyssey, abandoning his crippled sister and inadvertently bringing tragedy on both of them. The novel chronicles Corker's first heady days at large and their tragicomic aftermath, giving Berger a chance to meditate on the naivete with which we view "freedom," on the ways a restrictive social order defines character and on how our unfulfilled yearnings often run riot in the prisons we build for them. Berger's insights about the dangers of a romantic European ideal, here symbolized by the role Vienna plays in Corker's intellectual life, remain pertinent today. The end--rendered in a postscript--is sad and funny; Corker's Pyrrhic victory is both painful and uplifting. Berger, who cares deeply about his characters, has created an unforgettable one in Corker.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an alternate
Hardcover
edition.
From Library Journal
By interspersing interior monologs with elaborate accounts of office routine, Berger ( Keeping a Rendezvous , Random, 1992) reveals a day in the life of William Corker, the aging proprietor of a small employment agency in Clapham. Having just fled the house where he had been living with his invalid sister, Corker seeks freedom by moving into rooms above his office and abandoning himself to romantic dreams much like those of J. Alfred Prufrock. In a lecture on the glories of Vienna, Corker gradually speaks what he feels rather than what is expected of him. Soon after this illusory moment of liberation, however, he finds himself penniless and implicated in a criminal conspiracy. Action in Berger's novel is limited, but scrutiny of character is as intense as that found in Proust or Henry James. Minute details are telling and may require patient attention from some readers.
- Albert E. Wilhelm, Tennessee Technological Univ., CookevilleCopyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an alternate
Hardcover
edition.
