G.

G. follows a man with no firm sense of home. His father is a rich merchant from Livorno. His mother is young, American, and his father’s lover. They conceive him in 1886, four years after Garibaldi’s death. His mother’s cousins, Beatrice and Jocelyn, raise him in rural England. Their noble family has lost much of its wealth.

G. feels far from his parents as he grows up. He becomes a man of the world who seduces others. He speaks several tongues and seeks the pleasures of the senses. He spends time in Paris, Milan, London and Trieste. He watches Europe change before the First World War. He sees unrest in politics and shifts in social life. New forms of technology also shape the world around him. Yet he stays detached and rejects the rule of fate. He seeks to be free but finds himself alone. He learns who he is, yet moves toward self-destruction.

John Berger blends a tale of the past with thoughts on sex and desire. The novel asks what it means to belong. Its main figure has no roots in one nation. It won the Booker Prize in 1972. Berger gave half his prize money to Britain’s Black Panthers. He did so to protest how prize sponsor Booker McConnell did business.

Berger wrote novels, poems, essays and plays, and reviewed art. Born in London in 1926, he first worked as a painter. He showed his art in London galleries, then became a critic. His later essays dealt with photos, art, politics and memory. He also wrote stories for The Threepenny Review and The New Yorker. He settled in France in 1974 and died aged 90.