Product Description

LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2008. In a dusty, ramshackle town lives A ida. Her insurgent lover Xavier has been imprisoned. Resolute, sensuous and tender, A ida s letters to the man she loves tell of daily events in the town, and of its motley collection of inhabitants whose lives flow through hers. But the area is under threat, and as a faceless power inexorably encroaches from outside, so the smallest details and acts of humanity an intimate dance, a shared meal assume for A ida a life-affirming significance, acts of resistance against the forces that might otherwise extinguish them. From A to X is a powerful exploration of how humanity affirms itself in struggle: imagining a community which, besieged by economic and military imperialism, finds transcendent hope in the pain and fragility, vulnerability and sorrow of daily existence.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #63496 in Books
• Published on: 2008-08-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 224 pages

Review
John Berger has given us an exquisite thing. This is a book of controlled rage sculpted with tools of tenderness and a searing political vision. Everything he writes about is profound, precise and invoiced: Liberty and the lack of it, hope and the lack of it, power and the lack of it, love and the terrible yearning that takes its place when the loved one has been taken away. --Arundhati Roy.............. From A to X is one of the most tender and poignant books I have read for many years. Its power rests in its economy of means, its account of enduring love surviving oppression. It demonstrates that however foul the forces oppressing us, love and the human spirit are indestructible. --Harold Pinter............... This little book is magic... It is original and graceful, sustained by a quiet rage. --Eileen Battersby, Irish Times, August 9th 2008............... From A to X is best understood, like all Berger's best work, as the record of one restless, committed, brilliant consciousness; a late showcase of a mind and sensibility of astonishing range and depth, which should be read as an epic poem or a lyrical essay as much as a novel. --Melissa Benn, The Independent, August 15th............... This little book is magic... It is original and graceful, sustained by a quiet rage. --Eileen Battersby, Irish Times, August 9th 2008

John Berger has found a voice perfectly fitted to express an emotional sincerity quite rare in fiction at the moment. --Ursula Le Guin, Guardian, August 16th

Superb passages of Berger's writing take on a gripping physicality and a corresponding profundity. --Richard T. Kelly, Financial Times, August 16th

About the Author
Storyteller, essayist, novelist, screenwriter, dramatist and critic, John Berger is one of the most internationally influential writers of the last fifty years. His many books include Ways of Seeing, the fiction trilogy Into Their Labours and, most recently, Here Is Where We Meet.

Customer Reviews

Beautiful and angry, but there's too much left unsaid in these letters
I loved this book, the writing was exquisite, but I needed so much more from it that ultimately it disappointed slightly.
A'ida and Xavier are lovers, but X is imprisoned on terrorist charges. Their story is teased out through some of A's letters to X in jail which were found in his cell when the new prison was built. He never replies, but sometimes writes on the back of the letters.
They live in an unnamed country where A'ida is a pharmacist. She writes about everyday life, her friends, neighbours and customers. There are always hints of troubles and oppression in the background and it is implied that she is also an activist. She is desperate to be married to X, but the authorities won't allow it so visiting X in prison is an unattainable goal for her - she eventually has to be content with fantasising about him. Xavier's writing is not about A, but is often angry thoughts about the authorities in the outside world that he is prisoner in.
The reader is left to fill in the gaps which gives great poignancy to the texts, but I was left hungry to find out what happened to them:- what X was imprisoned for, what A's role was in their struggle, and myriad other questions. Just a few answers would have satisfied, but with the exception of a brief scene-setting introduction, the author is deliberate in his intention of letting these letters speak for themselves.

A little jewel of a book
From A to X is a little jewel of a book. Its form is as much a thing of beauty as its contents.

John Berger has created a series of letters from A'ida to Xavier - a life sentence prisoner in an unnamed hot country, apparently accused of terrorism. The letters are undated and bound into three non-chronological bundles. And on the back of some letters, Xavier has written his own text.

At first, the reader is totally disorientated. Berger's introduction makes it seem as though there is some elaborate game being played, and the early temptation is to discover the rules. The first letters in the book contain mid numbingly trivial thoughts, and this makes the reader wonder whether there is some code at play - perhaps reading initial letters or every third word. If there is a code, it's a good `un.

But as the lack of narrative thread; lack of code; lack of connection between A'ida's letters and Xavier's responses all starts to become apparent, so too does the beauty of each individual letter; each vignette become apparent. There are big themes at play - love; loneliness; separation; frustration; confinement; time. We see A'ida's hope for a marriage; hope for a family turn into hope simply for an opportunity to be together again. The time frame of the letters is not revealed - although the odd letter does drop a hint - but it is obviously a great many years. A'ida grows old before our eyes - presumably so to does Xavier. Their fire to change the world mellows into a much more personal fire of frustrated love.

And the vignettes are quite lovely - crafted in beautiful and often understated language. Some are reminiscences of A'ida's former life with Xavier and these have a dreamlike quality. Others are scenes from A'ida's recent life and hint at secret messages in amongst the humdrum detail. And some seem to be purely written from the heart by a woman who is afraid to build a new life for herself whilst her love languishes in jail.

Berger deliberately sets the book in an unknowable country. Names are drawn from various languages. Perhaps the prison is in the Middle East, perhaps in North Africa, at one point perhaps even in Brazil. But a specific setting would have distracted from the novel. The absence of a location lets the narrative, such as it is, focus narrowly on the town itself with hints (and more than hints) of army oppression, focus on Xavier in his cell, and dream of the wide world.

There is an urge, when reading the letters, to tear the pages from the book and re-order them - perhaps to offer a more satisfying, more comfortable read. But one scene, in which A'ida persuades the owner of the pharmacy in which she works to re-order the medicines might offer some insight. A'ida asked that the medicines be ordered according to curative properties rather than by name. Perhaps Xavier ordered his letters with something similar in mind. That's a puzzle.

The intensity of the read builds and builds. It is compelling, yet unknowable. This little enigma of a novel deserves its place on the Booker longlist - and I'd hope to see it go much further.

Love is secondary.
I generally remain a little bit confused whenever I finish a book from John Berger : each one appears to me so different from all the others , as if they were written by different authors. When loving a writer, one's normal preference is to read more of his work first to enjoy it ,and then to understand the personality and the development of the author. John Berger is with no doubt, an extremely rich personality and not an easy person: a very good art critic in "Success and failure of Picasso" etc. ; an excellent novelist in one of my preferable novels "To the wedding" and , more in a little non fiction masterpiece of remarkable deep human love: "A fortuned man" or "the story of a country doctor". Two extremely beautiful books....never to be compared neither to the lack of quality in "G" his 1972 Booker prize , nor for instance with "And our faces, my heart, brief as photos" where a breath taking poetical title is followed by a rather meaningless mixture of ideas .

"From A to X" could very well impress, as it probably does, by its freedom, its versatility, by its imagination. But I find here another author writing another book : I don't find in this book the beauty and the style of the ones I love. There are indeed very interesting nowadays topics: an actual terrible lack of personal individual freedom, to day horrible wars, injustice, a political positive vision , all a little bit hidden underneath a sad story of love and absence. Letters and more letters perhaps very tender but tiresome, repetitive ,and above anything letters without an answer.
Berger feels and wrote more than one beautiful sentence about true love. But I think-and probably this is not what he wants- that love is a very secondary theme in "From A to X". One thing is trying to write love letters as a woman would do through identification probably, while another very different thing are love letters written by a woman. Some days ago I was reading "Rapture" by Carol Ann Dufy and I saw the difference : there is not half an inch of this beauty and soul richness in A'ida letters. The lack of any answer troubles me, that kind of void has nothing to do with love. I think, finally, that the love under which lies all the drama, is not expressed in a satisfactory way.

Perhaps the basic theme, the drama, is not love but politics.
As Berger perhaps finally expresses it: political drama of today seems to have no answer.

This book left me a bit unsatisfied. Berger is considered an excellent writer: it is very possible that you, MY reader in this very moment, could find it beautiful ! Therefore, you would do much better if you try it and deduct your own positive opinion. Probably myself would add one or two stars more if I could keep on understanding more of this interesting book !