Berg

by Ann Quin

"A man called Berg, who changed his name to Greb, came to a seaside town intending to kill his father. . . " So begins Ann Quin's first novel, a debut "so staggeringly superior to most you'll never forget it" (The Guardian). Alistair Berg, hair restorer, shares a mistress with his father. He will, he decides, eliminate his rival. After mutilating a ventriloquist's dummy, he finds himself accidentally seduced by the man he needs to kill. Mordant, heady,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1911508547
• ISBN13: 9781911508540
• Release Date: May 2019
• Publisher: And Other Stories
• Length: 168 Pages
• Weight: 0.44 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.0" x 7.7"

Customer Reviews

Ann Quin's First Novel

A man tracks down the father he never knew and, concealing his identity, befriends him and has an affair with his mistress. Ann Quin's first novel was a big success in 1964 & remains her best known book. The plot is a characteristic 60s mix of lowlife absurd (Beckett, Pinter) & symbolism (Freud, Laing). In one scene the drunken father tries to rape the son who has dressed up in the father's mistress's clothes! And then there's some creepy perversity concerning a ventriloquist's dummy.... Although of its time & betraying some of the over-ripe awkwardness of a first novel, the extraordinary quality of Ann Quin's writing retains its disturbing power today. If you find the attempts of today's Brat novelists to write "on the edge" laughably obvious & shallow, then read some Ann Quin for the real thing.

bent up triangle

I do recommend this novel, but only to those who will not desperately flee some miserably twisted circumstances. This novel continues the experimentation of the English novel as a form that Beckett put a halt to when he became French. Berg really is tremendously dark, but it has an oddity or eccentricity that makes it not only memorable but meaningful. In addition to the story indicated in the editorial reviews above, it does something to resemble in content an almost Graeco-tragedian structure puttied with a more domestically modern flesh. This novel is one that totally disturbed me in ways that did not make me love it but I find that the author is wonderfully comic, creative, pleasingly dark and intelligent. For such an odd book, I do not know how to say I recommend it, but for a continuance in one's education of novelistic recourses this may be one book that makes you happy in a rather uncomfortable way. If for no other reason, pick this novel up to read the first sentence.