G. - by John Berger (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

In this Booker Prize-winning classic, a Casanova-esque young man searches for philosophical and sexual fulfillment as he seduces his way across Europe on the eve of World War I.

John Berger's picaresque work, one of the author's finest novels, is an inspired exploration of intimacy and loneliness set at the turn of the twentieth century.

Who is G.? The illegitimate son of an Italian candy merchant and a rich young American divorcée, G. is born at the end of the nineteenth century and raised on a farm in England before going on to a Europe that will soon explode in war. G. is a seducer and a cipher, moving from place to place and woman to woman. G. seeks and finds revelation in the shared immediacy of the senses. At the same time, G. is the specter of capitalism's atomized social world. He experiences the persistence of love and the impossibility of love in the world we have been condemned to live in.

What is G.? A historical novel, a coming-of-age novel, a novel of the transformative and terrifying twentieth century, and a novel exploring all the different things the novel can be, full of stories of men and women, but also of poems, essays, and drawings. It is an inquiry into the nature of sexuality, the strangeness of love, and the inescapable demands of solidarity, a novel that seeks to imagine "a new way of living." At the center of it an aviator sets out to fly across the Alps for the first time, while a man and woman, lost in their own world, meet for a rendezvous in a hotel. "Never again," the narrator writes, "will a single story be told as if it were the only one."

G. is an initial, the beginning of something new.

Review Quotes

"What makes the novel worth reading generations later... are the passages of startling analytic and phenomenological insight... The great pleasure that G. offers comes from the wide and sensitive intelligence visible in such passages, the author's unembarrassed earnestness about life's mysteries, qualities so un-English and so seldom seen in English literature they feel vivid and original almost half a century later." -- Anuk Arudpragasam

"A novel which is an essay in the French style, replete with examples, explanations, poems, metaphors, and incidents, many of them occupying paragraphs of their own within a frame of white space, like pictures in a gallery." -- Ben Ratliff, The New York Review of Books


"With profound compassion, Berger explores the hearts and minds of both men and women, and what happens during sex." -- 1972 Booker Prize Judges

"A fine, humane and challenging book." -- New Republic

"Fascinating...an extraordinary mixture of historical detail and sexual meditation...G. belongs in the tradition of George Eliot, Tolstoy, D. H. Lawrence and Norman Mailer." --The New York Times

"G. is a book about sex and sensory experience as a means to think through personal freedom, collective experience, and what form, precisely, the stories we tell ourselves take -- what impact that narrativisation has on the broader sweep of history...I implore you, whole-heartedly, to buy a copy of G." -- Jo Hamya

"For all its high-minded experimentation and self-conscious stylistic quirks, this book remains firmly grounded in the physical world... [G. is] a rich and pleasurable reading experience, as well as an admirably uncompromising, not to mention provocative intellectual challenge." -- Sam Jordison, The Guardian

About the Author

John Berger (1926-2017) was a novelist, painter, poet, and one of the most influential art critics of the last 75 years. His many books include Ways of Seeing, the Booker Prize-winning novel G, A Fortunate Man, the Into Their Labours trilogy, and From A to X.

Ben Lerner is the author of nine books of poetry and prose as well as several collaborations with visual artists. A recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and MacArthur Foundations, he is a Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College.