Here Is Where We Meet
A Fiction
(Sprache: Englisch)
John, der Ich-Erzähler, trifft in Lissabon auf einer Parkbank seine längst verstorbene Mutter wieder. In Genf besucht er mit seiner Tochter das Grab von Jorge Luis Borges und in Islington erinnert er sich an die Studienzeit an der Kunsthochschule und die...
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John, der Ich-Erzähler, trifft in Lissabon auf einer Parkbank seine längst verstorbene Mutter wieder. In Genf besucht er mit seiner Tochter das Grab von Jorge Luis Borges und in Islington erinnert er sich an die Studienzeit an der Kunsthochschule und die Londoner Liebesnächte, während die Bomben fielen. All das sind Stationen auf John Bergers Buch der Erinnerung, in dem er all seine großen Themen vereint: Begegnungen und Abschiede, das Sichtbare und Verborgene, die Kunst und das Leben.
Klappentext zu „Here Is Where We Meet “
Booker Prize-winning author John Berger, one of the most widely admired writers of our time, returns us to the captivating play and narrative allure of his previous novels G. and Pig Earth among them with a shimmering fiction drawn from chapters of his own life.One hot afternoon in Lisbon, the narrator finds his long-dead mother seated on a park bench. The dead don t stay where they are buried, she tells him. And so begins a remarkable odyssey, told in simple yet gorgeous prose, that carries us from the London Blitz in 1943, to a Polish market, to a Paleolithic cave, to the Ritz Hotel in Madrid. Here Is Where We Meet is a unique literary journey that moves freely through time and space but never loses its foothold in the sensuous present.
Lese-Probe zu „Here Is Where We Meet “
ILisboa
In the centre of a square in Lisboa there is a tree called a Lusitanian (which is to say, Portuguese) cypress. Its branches, instead of pointing up to the sky, have been trained to grow outwards, horizontally, so that they form a gigantic, impenetrable, very low umbrella with a diameter of twenty metres. One hundred people could easily shelter under it. The branches are supported by metal props, arranged in circles around the twisted massive trunk; the tree is at least two hundred years old. Beside it stands a formal notice-board with a poem to passers-by written on it.
I paused to try to decipher a few lines:
... I am the handle of your hoe, the gate of your house, the wood of your cradle and the wood of your coffin...
Elsewhere in the square chickens were pecking for worms on the unkempt grass. At several tables men were playing sueca, each one selecting and then placing his card on the table with an expression that combined wisdom and resignation. Winning here was a quiet pleasure.
It was hot -- perhaps 28 C -- at the end of the month of May. In a week or two, Africa, which begins -- in a manner of speaking -- on the far bank of the Tagus, would begin to impose a distant yet tangible presence. An old woman with an umbrella was sitting very still on one of the park benches. She had the kind of stillness that draws attention to itself. Sitting there on the park bench, she was determined to be noticed. A man with a siotcase walked through the square with the air of going to a rendezvous he kept every day. Afterwards a woman carrying a little dog in her arms -- both of them looking sad -- passed, heading down towards the Avenida da Liberdade. The old woman on the bench persisted in her demonstrative stillness. To whom was it addressed?
Abruptly, as I was asking myself this question, she got to her feet, turned and, using her umbrella like a walking stick, came towards me.
I recognised her walk, long before I could see her
... mehr
face. The walk of somebody already looking forward to arriving and sitting down. It was my mother.
It happens sometimes in my dreams that I have to phone my parents' flat, in order to tell them -- or to ask them to tell somebody else -- that I'm likely to be late, because I've missed a connection. I want to warn them that I'm not, at that moment, where I'm meant to be. The details vary from dream to dream, but the gist of what I have to tell them remains the same. What also remains the same is that I don't have my address book with me, and, although I attempt to remember their telephone number and try out several, I never find the right one. This corresponds with the truth that in my waking life I have forgotten the telephone number of the flat in which my parents lived for twenty years and which I once knew by heart. What, however, I forget in my dreams is that they are dead. My father died twenty-five years ago and my mother ten years later.
In the square, she took my arm and by common consent we crossed the street and walked slowly towards the top of the Mae d'Agua staircase.
There's something, John, you shouldn't forget -- you forget too much. The thing you should know is this: the dead don't stay where they are buried.
As she began talking, she didn't look at me. She looked concentratedly at the ground a few metres ahead of us. She was worried about tripping.
I'm not talking about heaven. Heaven is all very well, but I happen to be talking about something different!
She paused and chewed as if one of the words had gristle on it and needed more chewing before being swallowed. Then she went on:
The dead when they're dead can choose where they want to live on Earth, always supposing they decide to stay on the Earth.
You mean they come
It happens sometimes in my dreams that I have to phone my parents' flat, in order to tell them -- or to ask them to tell somebody else -- that I'm likely to be late, because I've missed a connection. I want to warn them that I'm not, at that moment, where I'm meant to be. The details vary from dream to dream, but the gist of what I have to tell them remains the same. What also remains the same is that I don't have my address book with me, and, although I attempt to remember their telephone number and try out several, I never find the right one. This corresponds with the truth that in my waking life I have forgotten the telephone number of the flat in which my parents lived for twenty years and which I once knew by heart. What, however, I forget in my dreams is that they are dead. My father died twenty-five years ago and my mother ten years later.
In the square, she took my arm and by common consent we crossed the street and walked slowly towards the top of the Mae d'Agua staircase.
There's something, John, you shouldn't forget -- you forget too much. The thing you should know is this: the dead don't stay where they are buried.
As she began talking, she didn't look at me. She looked concentratedly at the ground a few metres ahead of us. She was worried about tripping.
I'm not talking about heaven. Heaven is all very well, but I happen to be talking about something different!
She paused and chewed as if one of the words had gristle on it and needed more chewing before being swallowed. Then she went on:
The dead when they're dead can choose where they want to live on Earth, always supposing they decide to stay on the Earth.
You mean they come
... weniger
Autoren-Porträt von John Berger
John Berger was born in London in 1926. He is well known for his novels and stories as well as for his works of nonfiction, including several volumes of art criticism. His first novel, A Painter of Our Time, was published in 1958, and since then his books have included Ways of Seeing, the fiction trilogy Into Their Labours, and the novel G., which won the Booker Prize in 1972. In 1962 he left Britain permanently, and lived in a small village in the French Alps. He died in 2017.
Bibliographische Angaben
- Autor: John Berger
- 2006, 256 Seiten, Maße: 12,9 x 20,3 cm, Kartoniert (TB), Englisch
- Verlag: Vintage, New York
- ISBN-10: 1400079330
- ISBN-13: 9781400079339
Sprache:
Englisch
Pressezitat
"A work of narrative art that is a fusion of all the forms he has mastered. . . . Berger once again is our guide to being truly present in life." The Seattle Times & Post-Intelligencer"A wonderful memoir/meditation/fiction, a vehemently personal sojourn through space and time that is almost as beautifully unclassifiable as Calvino's Invisible Cities." Buffalo News"Either an autobiographical fiction, a fictional autobiography, or maybe a hybrid of breviary, consecration, and ancestor worship; in any case, quite brilliant." Harper's" Berger unpacks a lifetime of living and dreaming into a series of inventive travelogues. . . . This is writing as art and armchair travel for those who love to get lost in the moment." Kansas City Star
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