Books like Photocopies by John Berger

John Berger uses words to capture a splendid array of moments, passing encounters, and unnoticed gestures - together they express a frieze in history as we near the end of the century, and Berger places us there within it. Through Berger's words we see a street performer achieve a stillness so profound it recalls death. We enter a room where Simone Weil once lived, and where her presence lingers unexpectedly. We watch a man whose youth was spent in the maze of the Gulag, now forced to leave the house he had always imagined for himself in the years of his imprisonment. A vagabond cyclist pedals into our line of sight: she sees the world as if through a moving window, flowers grow in her basket as though on a windowsill. Each "photocopy" is about someone for whom Berger felt a kind of love. In giving life to these moments that caught his heart, Berger gives us, involuntarily, an intimate yet elusive portrait of himself.

First publish date: 1996