From Amazon.com
With the sensuous eye and profound sense of history that have made him one of the most acclaimed living novelists, John Berger, author of
G., tells the story of a wedding that takes place in a Europe that is approaching the end of the century, a place where everything has changed - and not even the certainties of love are exempt. This is Berger's
fin de siecle , a transcendent celebration of passion at the end of our millennium.
--Ce texte provient de la
Paperback
édition.
From Publishers Weekly
Ritual and myth; technology and science; history, both natural and human?each plays a crucial supporting role in this novel about a Franco-Italian railwayman, a Czech engineer, their un-selfpitying HIV-positive daughter and the Italian street vendor who determines to marry her. Among the many beauties of this highly original work?which matches Berger's Into Their Labours trilogy in sweep and power?are its command of the various cultures and settings depicted and the way its voices filter through the central narrative presence, a blind Greek peddler of religious artifacts. Berger's gift for the succinctly rendered incident or detail?heightened in the context of the daughter's impending death?lends the tale both eventful density and narrative lightness, speeding it across the post-Cold War Europe that is the story's true love object, toward the moving and bittersweet scenes of the denouement. With its muted despair over our recent cultural and political failings ("Mankind has lost its nerve") and its tender and determined celebration of its characters in spite of it, Berger's latest work speaks uniquely to the present.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
