Books : From A to X: A Story in Letters
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN: 9781844672882
ISBN: 1844672883
Label: Verso
Manufacturer: Verso
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 224
Publication Date: September 01, 2008
Publisher: Verso
Sales Rank: 53104
Studio: Verso
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Product Description:
A beautifully imagined story of love and resistance, by one of the foremost novelists of our age.
In the dusty, ramshackle town of Suse lives A'ida. Her insurgent husband Xavier has been imprisoned. Resolute, sensuous and tender, A'ida's letters to the man she loves tell of daily events in the town, and of its motley collection of inhabitants whose lives flow through hers. But Suse is under threat, and as a faceless power inexorably encroaches from outside, so the smallest details and acts of humanity—an intimate dance, a shared meal—assume for A'ida a life-affirming significance, acts of resistance against the forces that might otherwise extinguish them. From A to X is a powerful exploration of how humanity affirms itself in struggle: imagining a community which, besieged by economic and military imperialism, finds transcendent hope in the pain and fragility, vulnerability and sorrow of daily existence.
Average Rating: 
Rating:  -
Berger is a marvel. He is a fearless artist armed with penetrating vision and magificent command of his craft. I have been reading his work since the mid-sixties and wonder always how it is that he never, ever gets stale.
There are many things to love about From A to X, such as its economy. Telling the story through letters and notes delivered a feel of intimacy I found quite gripping, especially so because it was delivered in the voice of the woman. It is a novel of political passion delivered in a quiet voice. I hope you read it.
Rating:  -
This is a "novel" in the form of a discontinuous, out-of-order series of letters from A'ida, an activist, to her imprisoned lover Xavier. The letters are arranged, as the book's conceit is explained in a brief introduction by Berger (who has "found" or "been given" them), as they have been found in Xavier's cell after he departed, in a few bundles. They are interspersed with little fragments of writing by Xavier -- the only words of his we read, as his replies to A'ida are not printed -- which are mostly political reflections, sometimes quoted from figures like Eduardo Galeano and Subcomandante Marcos, and which in the main sound suspiciously like interjections from Berger himself, though this is not at all obtrusive or disruptive to the reader's experience. The letters from A'ida retell little incidents of life and political resistance, from a neighbor's jelly-making to her work at a pharmacy to a night of protest, ringed by occupiers' tanks. While the setting is deliberately fictionalized and the place names are drawn from ancient Assyria, there are still some details that make it seem likely the characters are Palestinians; but their experience is meant to be an allegory of activist life anywhere rather than a depiction of a specific place or a single historical moment. (Xavier's situation clearly evokes that of Nazim Hikmet or Antonio Gramsci, for instance.)
Though there are a few incidents, for the most part there is little plot, little development in ... Read More
Rating: -
Ah, such beauty, such clarity, and much power. Which is why I have 1st editions of all Berger's books. Read From A to X with wonder!
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