Photocopies: Encounters

by John Berger

Book Overview

Booker Prize-winning author John Berger presents a collection of moments, each supremely vivid, that together make up a frieze of human history at the end of the millennium as well as a subtle and affecting self-portrait of their author. Using careful, intensely visual prose snapping frozen vignettes of life, these twenty-nine photocopies teach us about lying and self-invention, dignity and tenderness, charity and courage. Overflowing with the sights,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0679755179
• ISBN13: 9780679755173
• Release Date: March 1998
• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.2" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Ways of Seeing

It's tempting to put quotes around the word "stories" when talking about John Berger's stories in Photocopies since they aren't really stories at all: they're sketches, quick studies, notes for stories, tributes, obituaries, or fey bulletins from a playful (and sometimes even too strategically playful) man. Berger has a great weakness for exclamation marks, for example, and too great a fondness (especially when writing about lithe and humorless women) for a sort of coy whimsy. The titles of his pieces, on the other hand, are workmanlike and plain and as static as the captions for photographs or paintings (A Bunch of Flowers in a Glass, Two Cats in a Basket, Two Dogs Under a Rock, Sheets of Paper Laid on the Grass). Or they suggest the titles of Japanese prints (A Woman and Man Standing beside a Plum Tree). There's a portrait of a house in Italy too (A House in the Sabine Mountains) which is both a portrait of a village and a brief history of time (Italian time). And there's also an elegy to an Alpine meadow that Berger visits after a friend's death. "The laws of probability change up there," he tells us in a brilliant and dislocating description of how and why this is so. "Sometimes the pine trees seem as if they've just stopped walking. There are nights when the Milky Way looks as close as a mosquito net." In A House Designed by Le Corbusier, the house, built in Paris in 1923, resembles an abandoned garage, with a studio wall of "murky glass", but it's the site of the most emotionally affecting tribute in the book--the house that André, a fourteen-year-old schoolboy, leaves behind him early in the winter of 1927 when he bids his mother (Berthe) and his stepfather (the sculptor Jacques Lipchitz) goodbye and travels by train to Moscow to meet--for the first time in his life--his father, a general in the Russian Army. He travels with the People's Minister of Education and with the Minister's mistress, who decides, as the train is pulling out of Berlin, that she hasn't bought all the underthings she intended to buy. She pulls down the chain for an emergency stop. The train comes to a halt. She disembarks. The other passengers play cards until she returns with her lingerie. On his arrival in Moscow on the morning of the tenth anniversary of the Russian revolution, André hurries straight to Red Square. His father is up on the podium in his general's uniform, taking the salute. André stares up at him but the temperature is -28 and he can think of nothing except how cold he is, dressed in a light summer suit and "a fashionable white raincoat with dark amber buttons". The officers behind the podium take pity on him and one of them approaches the General to ask what should be done. The father's response--and this must be one of the most bizarre introductions of father to son in all of history and literature--is decisive: Wrap him up in a tarpaulin and deliver him to my house! But then the introduction to the stepmother is not exactly run of the

Brilliant Reproductions of Memory Through Prose

"Photocopies" is a collection of twenty-eight stories, together with a photograph and a drawing. None of the stories is more than a few pages. Each of the "stories" is a vivid prose rendering of a person or place that left a seemingly indelible impression on John Berger's acutely refined sense of seeing. It is a collection marked by a minimalist sensibility, but not the cold, sterile minimalism found in the writing of Samuel Beckett or Gordon Lish. It is, instead, the warm, heartfelt minimalism of a writer striving to capture the fleeting, but enduringly memorable, moments of a human life."Photocopies" opens not with a photocopy, but with a photograph: the blurred, poorly-lighted photograph of a man and a woman standing under a tree. It is a sort of introduction to the first story, "A Woman and Man Standing by a Plum Tree," where Berger relates his memory of a woman he once met at a reading in Madrid who then turned up, several years later, at his country home in France. The woman is not identified by name. She is in her thirties, an artist and photographer who makes her living by restoring frescoes. The woman brings along a primitive, home-made plywood camera and, at the end of her visit, takes a picture of the two of them together under a plum tree:"The two of us stood there facing the camera. We moved, of course, but not more than the plum trees did in the wind. Minutes passed. Whilst we stood there, we reflected the light, and what we reflected went through the black hole into the dark box. It'll be of us, she said, and we waited expectantly."Unlike the photograph, the story that accompanies it, and the other twenty-seven stories in the collection, are clear, precise, vividly-rendered pictures from John Berger's memory. In this sense, Berger's use of a blurred photographic image to introduce the collection is a bit of irony. Ordinarily, a photograph is considered a very exact image of a moment in time. In Berger's telling, however, the more exact image is found in Berger's memory and in the reproduction (or "photocopy") of that memory that is rendered in prose."Photocopies" includes recollections of Henri Cartier-Bresson ("A Man Begging in the Metro") and Simone Weil ("A Girl Like Antigone"), as well as numerous unidentifiable, but memorable, friends and acquaintances of Berger. It also includes, in typical Berger fashion, insightful thoughts on drawing ("A Young Woman with Hand to Her Chin") and on the way that images of the body are influenced by local terrain and climate ("Island of Sifnos"). "Photocopies" is a stunning example of how a sensitive, perceptive observer can render a vivid image of the world in prose. In this sense, Berger's collection is a true work of art, a book that I highly recommend not only as entertaining literature, but as a text that merits close reading and careful study by writers and artists.

Neural Net Hardcopy

This is the first work that I have read by Mr. John Berger. Entitled, "Photocopies", it is a collection of 29 memories that he made more permanent by placing them in print. I don't know at what point a novella becomes a short story, or when the latter becomes something else again. Mr. Berger presents these 29 experiences in 180 pages, and while the number presented can be said to be great as measured by the little space they occupy, it would be an error to judge the quality of what they contain by their brevity.There are not many Authors who can skillfully execute short literary works. By their definition they allow comparatively short spans of space and reading time to take the reader where the Author has mapped his or her trip. So what level of skill and experience can make a reader enjoy and think when provided with only a handful of words? Quite high for the former, and lengthy for the latter I think.Not many writers can create a sentence that includes the work of both Donatello and Thelonius Monk to explain the achievement of a prison escape. The reader is also treated to metaphors that will become memories. Mr. Berger in describing the aged hands of a laborer could have slipped into cliché, or a variant on many others. However he compares the hands to, "certain old words that today are going out of use".This volume is a remarkable collection of thoughts, observations and memories that never exceed a few pages, and in one example consumes only a single leaf. Yet they are all of interest, they provoke thought, and they illustrate what results when skill, gifts, and life experience are placed on paper.

"Photocopies" is profound

"Photocopies" is profound. Like those "packed" files on computer software disks that unpack when you load the program, these brief pieces unpack in my mind. I can read only about two at a time because they are so satisfyin