To the Wedding

author
John Berger

the spiel
Now here is a book that contains multitudes. Truly an allegory for our time—it reads like a story that's been passed from person to person, smoothed down by each retelling. To the Wedding is a fluid and oracular tale that will burrow into your heart and stay there for years to come.
Also, it's got the most accurately represented book blurb I've ever read;

here it is
"With the sensuous eye and profound sense of history that have made him one of the most acclaimed novelists writing in English, John Berger, tells the story of a wedding. But this wedding takes place in a Europe that is approaching the end of the century, a place where everything has changed—and not even the certainties of love are exempt.

Gino and Ninon are getting married; they are making a claim on the future. Their stories—and those of Ninon's mother and father, who separated long ago and now journey toward each other from the ends of the continent—are told by a blind Greek peddler, who hears everything: waterfalls, the roar of a motorcycle, prayers, the chat of computer hackers, the music that Ninon will dance to on her wedding day. Here is a novel both tragic and joyous, intelligent and erotic, a transcendent celebration of passion at the end of our millennium."

p.s.
I dragged this book halfway across the world in a backpack, forgoing a second pair of pants, extra underwear, and clean t-shirts, so that I could bring the particular copy I read home with me, when I returned to the states. It is that good.

some of the hype
"A great, sad, and tender lyric, a novel that is a vortex of community and compassion that somehow overcomes fate and death. Wherever I live in the world, I know I will have this book with me."
— Michael Ondaatje

"A dramatic masterstroke...about the natural grandeur of human love."
—The New York Times Book Review

"A wonderful book, one which yields immediate pleasure and promises to stay long in the mind."
—The Sunday Times (London)

some other things this author has written
Into Their Labours
(Pig Earth, Once in Europa, Lilac and Flag: A Trilogy)
A Painter of Our Time
Permanent Red
The Foot of Clive
Corker's Freedom
A Fortunate Man
Art and Revolution
The Moment of Cubism and Other Essays
The Look of Things: Selected Essays and Articles
Ways of Seeing
Another Way of Telling
A Seventh Man
G.
About Looking
And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos
Keeping a Rendezvous
Hold Everything, Dear
From A to X