G.

A beautifully written meditation on so many aspects of being a human being at a momentous period of the early 20th century.

The Booker Prize winner for 1972, this is a quite extraordinary book, telling the story of a boy, the child of an Italian father and an unmarried rich American mother who sends him to her cousin's estate in England to be brought up by Jocelyn (quintessential country gentleman) and his sister Beatrice.This is not a book for the prudish-minded since there is sexual content and some crudity in the form of schematic drawing. Nevertheless it is an important book in the way it addresses the patriarchal society of the time. It is remorseless in its depiction of sexual politics, but also has two or three exceptionally well-written set pieces, one depicting a riot during the Italian nationalist uprising during the teens of the century, and, later, another covering the situation in Trieste after the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. That city was a in a ferment situated as it is on the border between Slovenia (later Serbia) and the Austro-Italian border. By this time G (which stands for George) has been cynically manoeuvred into acting as a kind of spy for the British, but he has no intention of being anything but his own man. Politics is irrelevant to him, sensuality and women interest him far more.Distinguished throughout by the lack of any plot or even, after childhood and fifteen year-old G's seduction by Beatrice, a coherent story, it is not a conventional novel or an easy read. The writing is curiously stilted at times and given to vast generalisations which are puzzlingly counter-intuitive, as Berger struggles to foreground a contempt for literary conventions. However, the novel consistently works towards a critique of patriarchy and gives a radical depiction of cultural and personal politics in the shifts and upheavals of a changing Europe.

I would really love to have given this more than 3 stars. I remember reading the review for this book in The Guardian in 1992 and wanting to read it. They told me that he was a groundbreaking author and I had the notion in my head that he would fall into the 'modern existential' school of writing, whereas what I got was a stodgy wade through 19th Century Europe's late revolutions and their aftermaths.Berger is very good at evoking mood and I must remember, if I ever use a time machine, not to go back to 19th Century Europe, for it seemed to me a dreary place of meaningless mores, urbane seducers and seductresses and the most laborious daily grind, both for the rich and poor. It seems an utterly dehumanising landscape - according to Berger. Imagine Silas Marner transposed into a later century and with little plot ingenuity.I got the feeling Berger merely wanted to communicate something about his own vanity; G seemed to be a man with infinite capacity to seduce women, any women he wanted, and this was a trait I found hard to believe in a man who longed to know his mother, estranged from his very early youth. He also lacked a father figure. How could such a boy grow up into such a successful pirate of the bedrooms?There was a brief moment of respite in the account of an early flying adventure, but it was short lived.I have to say that I got lost in Berger's rambling hyperbole. Perhaps he was trying to say something, but it was lost on me.His lack of punctuation - few commas and no speech marks at all, dialogue being simple placed in the middle of narrative passages - meant that I often lost the meaning of sentences and had to read the whole paragraph again.The whole experience left me wondering whether this was either a vanity project or something thrown together from a pile of notes in a desperate attempt to get a novel out during a bleak economic period (which the early 90s were). How it won the Booker Prize, I simply cannot fathom.Having said all this, there are some wonderful descriptive passages, so if you like 19th and 20th century Italian history, you might like it.

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.

Delivery of this was great - I was going on holiday and wanted to take this with me and wasn't sure I had left enough time… service was great. Oh and the book condition was excellent… and the book was outstanding.