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New books

By John Leonard

In the second chapter of John Berger’s HERE IS WHERE WE MEET (Pantheon, $24)—a book that is either an autobiographical fiction, a fictional autobiography, or maybe a hybrid of breviary, consecration, and ancestor worship; in any case, quite brilliant—the seventy-something Marxist novelist/art critic/screenwriter arrives by motorbike in Geneva, Switzerland, to visit both his daughter, Katya, and the unlikely grave of Jorge Luis Borges. And while Berger is dreaming about politics and sex, the Argentine poet steals one of his gloves.

Borges, Berger has already explained, “undressed only in poems, which, at the same time, were his clothes.” But this Geneva Borges is a ghost. As is the Rosa Luxemburg Berger finds at a wedding in the Eastern European woods. Also a ghost, in Lisbon, is Berger’s mother, Miriam, who never read any of his books. So, too, in the Place Nowy open-market square in Krakow, is Ken a ghost of the New Zealand journalist, schoolteacher, dance instructor, bookseller, and film extra who taught Berger to play poker, snooker, darts, and chess; who introduced him to Orwell, Proust, Henry Miller, García Lorca, and Oscar Wilde; “who made me believe that together we could find music in any city in the world.” As are, of course, the Cro-Magnons he meets in the cave at Chauvet, apparitions whose rock paintings antedate Lascaux and Altamira by 15,000 years: “Art, it would seem, is born like a foal who can walk straight away. The talent to make art accompanies the need for that art; they arrive together.”

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SEE ALSO: Here is where we meet (Book); De Madariaga, Isabel; Ivan the terrible (Book); Berger, John; Irving, John; McGhee, Robert; The last imaginary place: a human history of the Arctic world (Book); Until I find you (Book)

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