Product Description

This novel centres on G, who seems impervious to everything around him. His interests are purely sexual, his crowning ideal fulfilment. Yet, in the end this is enough for the politics of desire to expose the criminal politics of oppression. John Berger is the author of "To The Wedding".

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #81737 in Books
• Published on: 1996-09-26
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Review
Booker Prize Winner in 1972. Berger's novel centres on G, who seems impervious and oblivious to everything around him; with the blitheness of Don Juan, his interests are purely sexual and he sees fulfilment as his only ideal. In the end, however, these politics of mere desire suffice to expose the criminal politics of oppression. When accepting his prize, Berger took the opportunity to condemn its givers, Booker McConnell, as imperialists and promised half the money to the Black Panthers. (Kirkus UK)

G. as anonymously archetypal as the use of the initial suggests, is the novel or rather anti-novel of the prominent British art critic and Marxist humanist. Berger is a man of bold and profligate talents and the work which is equally diverse (philosophical, social, moral) is capable of many readings. Superficially - a dangerous trap indeed - it is an almost contemporary retelling of the Don Juan myth. The book doses on the eve of World War I. G. is the illegitimate son of a gross merchant of Livorno and a fragile and uncertain Englishwoman whom he cannot marry. She takes the child back to England where before long he is abandoned to the care of others and after early episodes of sexual initiation (a governess, a tutor, his surrogate mother) becomes (in retaliation or because he has no other roots?) a womanizer. In his pursuit of the wife of a Parisian car manufacturer, the didactic eroticism leads to far broader-ranging speculation on the inseparability of romantic love and sexuality - on the act of submission which is again the bestowal of freedom and on sex as an equivalent of death - that familiar little death which is so "absurdly short-lived." Death encroaches more and more as the novel reaches its final inset in Trieste where G. becomes the circumstantial whim of the events taking place all around him; ahistorical, apolitical, he is used and betrayed by just those historical and political forces and only in dying perhaps achieves the answer to the lack of identity imposed on him since the beginning. Paradox abounds throughout the novel which Berger annotates with epigrammatic asides ("The writer's desire to finish is fatal to the truth") or evasive ones ("Yet we know there is a mystery. . . . I am writing this book in the same dark"). As for the rest, his style is aggressively visual and animated by its inexorable present tense. Ultimately (and ignoring the common reader whom it will defeat) it is an arresting, inordinately vital, impersonal, and remarkable work. (Kirkus Reviews)

Customer Reviews

Self-indulgent and drab - it hasn't stood the test of time
Originally published in 1972 and set mostly in the early 1900s, this book now qualifies as nostalgia in two different ways.

The story is not particularly new, the tale of a rich Don Juan/Casanova-style character drifting and seducing directionlessly through Europe supported by and yet eventually condemned by the liberal company he finds himself in.

The writing style is of a kind when in 1972 would still have been seen as revolutionary. It has broken narrative, unconventional mixing of first- and third-person for both interior thoughts and exterior actions, and of course it is sexually explicit in parts, including a handful of crude (in two ways) drawings inserted into the text for no particular reason. What may have been seen as challenging 'new lit' and worthy of the Booker Prize on its first publication now comes across as a bit messy, self-indulgent, even childish.

The worst thing about the book is the author's tendency to forget that he is writing fiction and write whole pages of sub-Freudian cod-psychoanalysis, particularly to do with sex. It's empty, interrupts the story, and in some places is simply sexism dressed up.

The partly redeeming aspects of the book, for me, were the characters. The women in the book were certainly not as one-dimensional as they could have been. But that wasn't enough to make me think of this book as worth praise.

Incomprehensiible
I have in my life read most of the Booker Prize offerings, so like to think that I have a reasonable understanding of popular literature. But what was this book about?, I didn't know when I started it and I still didn't know when I was 3/4 of the way through, which is where I abandoned it. As another reveiwer said, definately a book for the coffee table, preferabley to prop up the dodgy leg!!!! and gather dust it certainly will!!

A strange choice by the Booker judges
This is the kind of book that only through the title was I able to remember the hero's name. Its concentration on the priviliged lives of the European genteel and descriptions of vastly dull sex scenes left me cold. It seemed that all the action was happening off stage- the few glipses of trench warfare were the only engaging and moving passages in the book.
Berger's writing suffers from his insitance on "explaining" things but not enough so they are at all understandable. In this repect G seems very much a book for those who like their books to say something about them whilst they gather dust on the shelves. If G is supposed to represent the old order I think the old order was very boring indeed.
The final few chapters involving Nusa, the Slovene- started to become interesting- she was the only character I had any sympahty with.
Fortunatly there are frequent gaps in the paragraphs in this book so you can roughly tell where you were if you drop off to sleep. If you like a book where pretentious people talk about nothing to each other and need an antidote to any kind of passion in sex then this may be the book for you. If you don't then I suggest you read a more worthy booker prize novel- Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie, a modern classic.