Product Description

With the poetic acuity that renders his work timeless, Booker Prize-winning author John Berger brings us a 24-hour chronicle of homelessness. Beside a highway, in a wasteland furnished with smashed trucks and broken washing machines, lives a vagrant 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #454168 in Books
• Published on: 2000-11-14
• Released on: 2000-11-14
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

Amazon.com 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 Publishers Weekly
It's difficult to tell a serious story in the voice of a dog, but that's what art critic (About Looking; Ways of Seeing) and novelist (G.) Berger has accomplished. The canine King introduces readers to a variety of intriguing humans in the squatter's community of Saint Val?ry, France, among them his ownersAthe well-educated but decadent Vico and the uncontrolled and passionate VicaAand Jack, the unofficial landlord of the settlement. The narrative rambles and ambles like its characters, blending speakers' reminiscences with present action; frequently, the squatters explain their pasts and describe how they became homeless. Berger creates a memorable setting for his cast, including an abandoned building jokingly dubbed Pizza Hut and a canyon called the Boeing because remnants of an aircraft have settled there. Though King narrates, much of the novel consists of human dialogue, with King functioning as a passive observer; his infrequent contributions, then, sensual and wise, are all the more notable and surprising. Berger's deceptively spare, disjointed style represents depths upon depths of perception and wisdom; in the bare landscape he has created, each word acquires symbolic resonance. So does each person: the political undercurrent in this tale of scrappy homeless people pushed out of the way by financial expediency will be lost on few readers. In bringing us so believably inside the head of an animal to elucidate the vagaries of human nature, Berger has not only accomplished an impressive technical feat, but has performed a humane act.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Black Beauty and Beautiful Joe, those classics narrated by animals, both protest cruelty to animals. Berger's animal-told tale protests cruelty to humans. King is a dog whose master and mistress, Vico and Vica, are old people living north of a city near the ocean on a stretch of bare land called Saint Valery, where they and other homeless persons have pitched makeshift shelters. King talks with all Saint Valery's inhabitants, some of whom seem mildly mad, but all of whom people with homes see as, essentially, stray dogs, which may be why King can talk with them. This talking is never explained, because the novel's concern is to chronicle one day in the life of its hopelessly poor characters--a day, moreover, that ends with their forced eviction from Saint Valery by police with bulldozers. A brilliant, experimental fiction writer, Berger, whose masterpiece is Pig Earth (1980), immerses readers so artfully, beautifully, and humanely in the experience of homelessness that the absurdity of a talking dog is forgotten. Ray Olson

Customer Reviews

A urban tragedy
KING, by John Berger is a poetic novel written entirely in stacato. It is a urban tragedy that takes place in an imaginary city (Barcelona, Paris, Glasgow, London or the city where I live in Lisbon) somehow like the city of Troy in another one of Berger's novel. It tells the story of one day in the life of a group of homeless carachters, with lots of even more poetic flash backs. All this is told to us, like an ancient greek narrator, that participates, observes and tells the story, by a dog or someone that believes he is a dog because everyone there has to find a way in the middle of the wreck and this is King's way to stand this living hell that is called poverty, a kind of a plague that nowadays is getting to even more people in the world. Nothing happens in the whole novel at least till the last chater, where the tragedy reveals itself... there's a mist of a tragedy in this whole novel that never really takes form of a terrific drama. There is a dense but soft and slow (like the plague that is taking control all over the place) tension.

Why does Berger, that in his last books criticized with such a distant look the urban and capitalist way of life, take this "dog" and lets him sign a book about a couple of homeless that live the rest of their lifes in a city, a "desert of souls"? It may seem like he is living in a city like this for a lot of years and full of watching his life being drained he decided just to release a book that has a critic point of view about it. But if you know Berger's work you will know that this is his most isolated, exhilated, distant and critic book about capitalism, the deception of the urban dream and the globalisation. In fact, Berger has a strong influence of lots of other authors like Giambattista Vico (the name of the main carachter is Vico, the name of the great italian philosopher that, like a prophet, said that every civilisation had to pass through four stages and the last one - il ricorso - is in fact the one we are living in, the AGE OF DOGS), Marx, Pascal and Beckett (a strong influence in most of his works and specially in this one we can find some great similarities).

Resuming, KING is a book to read when a person is feeling good. Like Berger (or King) says: "To read a man needs to love himself, not much but a little."

King is a pearl and like Goethe said: "A well trained dog is worth the respect of the most wise man" and Mr. Berger has trained him well.

I recomend it.

PEDRO ALVEs

A Person Could Not
Mr. Berger uses man's best friend to describe the human existence of the homeless. The 24 hours of experiences the canine "King" relates, had to be told by an animal other than a human, it could not otherwise work. Man as an animal shares many commonalities with the rest of the animal kingdom. As time passes skills we thought unique to ourselves are becoming fewer, I would offer speech as an example. One only has to read of the care that Elephants treat their dead and dying, the ways they revisit their dead to understand that compassion too is something we have yet to master.

We can claim something that is unique to our group. We kill our own, we torture our own, we systematically exterminate and ethnically cleanse our own. And as King relates to us we lack the compassion for those we would prefer to ignore rather than to help. There is a moment when the act of dousing a sleeping man with gasoline and lighting him afire is described as the death of a heretic. King muses the heretic's crime, could it be he is poor?

This book can be easily dismissed as being nothing new and that perhaps is the point. We have become a group that is nearly impossible to shock, the youngest of our group now kill aimlessly, and older members kill the youngest with no more concern than swatting a insect. Those with power persecute the weak; it has become all but a sport.

Mr. Berger's book is important because it shows behavior that should be contemptible, but has become so common, so cliché, it is rarely even contemplated. He needed to use a dog to bring attention to a human problem because a person is not qualified to comment on how we behave.

An important book by a talented man who has lived a long life, and clearly is less than impressed with what he has seen.

This is a beautiful book
Prose that is poetry. A must for any fan of John Berger. And for readers that don't know his work it should be a revelation. An extraordinary, moving, and passionately empathetic book.