Synopsis

John Berger relates the story of “G.,” a young man forging an energetic sexual career in Europe during the early years of the twentieth century. With profound compassion, Berger explores the hearts and minds of both men and women, and what happens during sex, to reveal the conditions of the Don Juan’s success: his essential loneliness, the quiet cumulation in each of his sexual experiences of all of those that precede it, the tenderness that infuses even the briefest of his encounters, and the way women experience their own extraordinariness through their moments with him. All of this Berger sets against the turbulent backdrop of Garibaldi and the failed revolution of Milanese workers in 1889, the Boer War, and the first flight across the Alps.

John Berger was born in November 1926 in London. He served in the British Army from 1944 to 1946; he then enrolled in the Chelsea School of Art and the Central School of Art in London. In 1952 Berger began writing for the New Statesman, and quickly became an influential Marxist art critic. He has published a number of art books including the famous Ways of Seeing, which was turned into a television series by the BBC. His novel G. won the 1972 Booker Prize and was also awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in the same year. John Berger moved to France a number of years ago and still lives there.