King: A Street Story - Softcover

Berger, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0375705341 ISBN 13: 9780375705342

Publisher: Vintage, 2000

Synopsis

With the poetic acuity that renders his work timeless, Booker Prize-winning author John Berger brings us a twenty-four hour chronicle of homelessness. Beside a highway, in a wasteland furnished with smashed trucks and broken washing machines, lives a homeless community of once-hopeful individuals, now abandoned by the twentieth century.

King, our narrator, is the guardian of a homeless couple, stealing meat from the butcher and sharing the warmth of his flesh. His canine sensibility affords him both amnesty from human hardship and rare insight into his companions' lives.  Through his senses we see--clearly and unsentimentally--the dignity and strength that can survive within chaos and pain.

About this title

Review

"The Terrain is used as a dump. Smashed lorries. Old boilers. Broken washing machines. Rotary lawn mowers. Refrigerators which don't make cold any more. Wash basins which are cracked. There are also bushes and small trees and tough flowers like pheasant's-eye and viper's-grass."

In John Berger's powerful novel King, the Terrain is also home to a small community of the dispossessed. Here, a stone's throw from a highway somewhere in France, in shelters constructed out of detritus, live Jack and Marcello, old Corinna and Liberto, Joachim and Anna, and Danny and Saul. Here also live Vica and Vico, an elderly couple (and couples are a rarity among the homeless) and their dog, King. It is King who narrates this day-in-the-life narrative, and Berger has endowed him with the ability to understand and be understood: "Lying beside the chestnut brazier, something came to me between the ears: the world is so bad, God has to exist. I asked Vico what he thought. 'Most people,' he said quickly, 'would draw the opposite conclusion.'"

What makes King such a singular creation is that despite his philosophical bent and communicative skills, there is nothing anthropomorphic about him. He thinks, behaves, and reacts like a dog, albeit a dog who ponders the existence of the Almighty. Animals are not sentimental, and neither is Berger. His human characters are irrevocably damaged, their lives verge on the unbearable, and their attempts to create family and community at the edges of society are eventually thwarted. There can be no happy ending to this street story, but Berger is after something bigger than making his readers feel good. Instead he shines a spotlight on a world we would prefer to ignore, using the love that Vica, Vico, and King feel for each other to illuminate a humanity that is all too often overlooked. King is not an easy book to read, but it is impossible to forget. --Alix Wilber

From the Publisher

"King, like most all of John Berger's work, is marked by sensitivity to the dark drift of f civilization and his ability to cast his insights into dramatic prose. He is an astute, compassionate, and compelling observer of the barbarism of our age. His novels and his essays are a kind of warning."--Barry Lopez

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0375705341
• ISBN 13: 9780375705342
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 189