Customer Reviews

To the Wedding

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I am going to be the lone voice in the wilderness... I could not get into this book, could not make it past the first thirty pages. The narrative voice rambles from first person to third person, often it is not clear what is going on... I think this is a challenging book and most certainly is not a novel for somebody who is looking for a light read.

This book is both beautiful and devestating. It is lyric and direct. Heart wrneching and hopeful. This book is contradictory and yet realistic in its contradictions. This book absolutely changed the way I read, and I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Pull out the kleenex, though.

A friend of mine recommended this book to me in 1996. In the past six years I have come back to it time and again for its sheer beauty. This is not one to miss.

There is an event in this book that demonstrates the wonderful manner that John Berger consistently illuminates his readers, and his characters. The task in and of itself is of no great note; a small boat is guided from the shore to a small island. Gino who is taking his reluctant fiancé on the trip guides the boat. Ninon is not concerned about the trip rather Gino's insistence that they marry. The trip to the island is accomplished in several steps to allow for currents both known and unpredictable. When the crossing is accomplished and Ninon continues to question the point of the exercise, Gino explains it has nothing to do with the island as a destination, but the trip that illustrates, "how we're going to live".

The couple decides to marry but before they do human weakness steps in and irrevocably alters the future they had planed. Neither conventional wisdom nor anyone who knows either member of the couple believes the wedding should take place. The bride to be is amongst those who wish to see the union forever cancelled. Gino is the only person willing to see through what his love for this woman has become for him, a commitment without condition.

The Author surrounds this couple with all the variants of marriage. He includes the innocent moments that lead to the first shared intimacies, and he has the unions that have failed to overcome the difficulties they encountered. Throughout this process he forces the reader to make some difficult observations either personally or through a given character they may identify with. The Wedding that is supposed to take place is like a vortex drawing all the participants and observers to the main event, the core. When all the players have made their own journeys, Gino is no longer the odd man out. He has come to define an ideal; he has always known what is right and what the consequences would be.

A cynic might question Gino based upon the issue of time, however this would be an error. Time firstly is an artificial human construct, and even if used as a measure we know nothing about its allotment to each of us, not what will transpire during our portion. Gino does not suffer from the arrogance of presumption of time and its length. And the Author John Berger must understand this as well, for no one could communicate this more clearly, and with the contemporary relevance than he does, if it wasn't his own philosophy as well.

It has now been several years since I read this book, and it still haunts me with its beauty and wisdom. I have read only 1 other of his books (Pig Earth), but on the strength of those alone, I think he should get a Nobel for literature. Not because writing is a contest but because then more people would read his books. Someone earlier in these reviews said this is the great novel to end this sorry sad century on, and I agree. Many things are wonderful about this book: the way characters' lives twine in and ut of the story like a jazz piece, all coalescing at the end; the characters themselves, even minor ones, will touch your heart. The story itself is both of tragedy and joy, of searching and finding,and finally, of the redemption of love even in our battered age. The event around which the book centers is specific and modern, but also symbolizes the fragility of all our lives and the necessity to love even in the face of the absurdity of existance. And, for these people, in the great book, that's enough. It works.

Better known as a latter day Marxist art critic, Berger has always balanced a social conscience with an extraordinary eye for the beautiful.

This novel is devestating...

Berger's terse and direct style has never been more appropriate. This is a heartbreaking story of doomed lovers who affirm love despite fate and death. In the end the book challenges us to say, 'yes, i will, yes.' but without the obstacles. as jeanette winterson once wrote: art invites.

This is an unforgettable book by a writer whose due for a Nobel prize recognition--that is, just so he can refuse it and go about his merry ways.

One of the best novels about the sickness and how it changes us and the others. A marvelous 'love-life-death-pain' story that begins as a trip that unfortunately has to end...

It has been years since I read this book, but it is a work that I will always hold dear and continually recommend. I wonder why so few customer reviews offer suggestions that might appeal to readers who liked the book in question? For fans of To The Wedding, may I suggest Kerri Hulme's The Bone People; Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, and newcomer Michelle Huneven's Round Rock.

I too recommend this book to all my friends. Most have told me they've cried at its ending (and most of my friends are jaded seen-it-all literary types in mottled turtlenecks and berets). My personal choice for the best novel of the 2nd half of this almost-exhausted wretched century.

I love this book and recommend it to all of my friends, no matter what their tastes are. "To the Wedding" is intimate and yet epic in spirit. what Mr. Berger does with voice is daring and remarkably effective: a blind man tells us what he sees, and characters are revealed in both in first and third-person. Like Ondaatje's Hana, Ninon and will remain with you for a long, long time.

This book is orthogonal to Berger's trilogy where, in the face of evidence to the contrary, one could still have hope. Here, the Spenglerian cycle does not help the farmer or anyone: science cannot be seen as the villain because science is the last and only hope to combat nature in the form of ... SIDA. This Berger is different from all the others. He has changed inside himself, has become more pessimistic with this book. Sad for us. The weakness of the trilogy was Lilac and Flag, where no solution was offered and the ending faded into pseudo-religious mythology. There, however, the strong mythology of the cycle (described in later introductions to Pig Earth) was in full force.