Merve Emre on John Berger via a review of Tom Overton’s “John Berger: From Life”
G. is maneuvered around Europe by a peculiarly restless omniscient narrator who may be, in one moment, far removed from the action—in a monoplane circling the Matterhorn, say—and, in the next, under the covers with G. and a woman. Often, the narrator breaks off the story to deliver an aperçu, cite a news headline, draw a dirty picture, or speak to readers in the first person, from Paris in 1972, where he shaves and picks up his dry cleaning. Berger is as present in the novel as he was on television, and he never lets his readers forget that he has deliberately selected the Don Juan story to reveal that political freedom and sexual pleasure are atmospherically connected. But he also cleverly updates the tale. Don Juan is a callous seducer, resented by the women he has deceived and dragged off to Hell for his sins. Berger’s libertine is a liberator, a vehicle of pleasure. He elicits a reciprocal exchange of gazes: sensuous, precise, and awed, equally desiring and equally vulnerable. Both he and the woman have to appear singularly naked, not nude, before each other.
