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Reading John Berger always feels like a rare privilege.
‘To the wedding� is not a straight story chronologically told, but an almost impressionistic, wrenching tale of two young lovers. Ninon has captured HIV and wants Gino to leave her. But while she is wrestling with the death she carries, Gino persists and persuades her to marry him knowing they might perhaps just count on two or three years. ‘We are going to live the years with craziness and cunning and care. All three. The three Cs. Matteo, the boxer, says I’m mad. He says I’m throwing my life away. That’s what most people do, I say, not me.�
The journey to the marriage unfolds itself in slow, separate treks (Ninon’s father Jean travels to Gorino (a small place near Venice, where the Po river meets the see) from France, Ninon’s mother Zdena starts her quest in Bratislava�
The fragments of the story are held together by the Greek narrator Tsobanakos (‘This means a men who herds sheep.�) who, like the blind clairvoyant Tiresias, obtains his information listening to the voices he hears, the visions he has� In his latest work, ‘Letters from A to X�, Berger equally describes a man who is almost blind but thanks to that sees also what’s in the distance: ‘Behind the thick lenses of his glasses his eyes are strange, because they are both concentrated and distant, as though they were looking at two things at the same time � at whatever is in front of him and, simultaneously, at the word or words representing it.�
For the reader who persists, as Gino persists, Berger has a gift in store: a breathtaking climax, a feast of romance and love, containing the images of death.
Gradually you get swept away on the tide of storylines bound for the same destination, coming together like the waters of the Po river, broad, slowly dragging it’s tail to the sea, to the place called Gorino, where the wedding will take place. ‘The ancients believed that the first act of creation was the separation of earth and sky and this was difficult, for earth and sky desired one another and did not want to separate. Around Gorino the land has become water to stay as close as possible to the sky, to reflect it as in a mirror.�
The introduction to this edition quotes Geoff Dyer who once said of Berger that he ‘reminds us of what most contemporary writing would have us to forget, which is that great writers are distinguished, ultimately, by the quality of their humanity.�
And therefore, reading (and rereading) Berger always feels like a rare privilege.