- Hardcover: 220 pages
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC; 1st Edition. edition (11 Feb 1999)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0747542864
- ISBN-13: 978-0747542865
- Product Dimensions: 21 x 14.8 x 2.4 cm
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,539,628 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
King lives with Vico and Vica on a rubbish dump off some European motorway. Subsistence is by scavenging and petty theft, with occasional fruitless recourses to vending chestnuts outside the local Pizza Hut. Perhaps the eponymous narrator of John Berger's street story is a dog, perhaps all the inhabitants of Saint Valery are. When home is a four-by-three metre hovel erected on a toxic garbage dump, can anyone be human--even a descendent of the great Humanist Giambattista Vico?
Berger, who became famous in the early '70s for sharing the sugar spoils of Booker-McConnell with Caribbean resistance groups after winning the Booker Prize for G, has advanced the claims of the dispossessed in writings on migrant workers, peasants and people with AIDS. His dog's-eye view of these desperate lives is strange and tender, transforming waste into keepsakes, as the poor must do.
Poisoned with the poetry of polymers (polyurethane, polycarbamide, polytetrafluoroethylene) and the smell of high octane, Saint Valery is the last resort for its inhabitants and a greenfield site for the speculators. When we're told that Vico believed "humanitas" to be derived from "humare", to bury, we know the ending. A dog's life indeed.--Mandy Merck
Product Description
Set in a wasteland beside the motorway, this novel is a homage to the homeless and a meditation on language and experience. King, a dog (or is he?), tells his story of life with a group of homeless people who reside among the smashed lorries, old boilers and broken washing machines of Saint Valery.
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5 reviews
15 of 16 people found the following review helpful
King is the word
26 Nov 1999
Format:Hardcover
King was published in the UK without John Berger's name on the cover. You only found it on the copyright page and on the endpaper at the back. This is a typically self-effacing move by a writer who is far more interested in telling stories than promoting himself. King takes us further into the zones of the dispossessed than Berger has gone before, even in his stunning trilogy Into Their Labours. A bunch of people live on a patch of urban wasteland; the narrator, King, is a dog who talks, or possibly a man who behaves like (maybe even appears as, maybe even is) a dog. They scrounge what little money and comfort they can get, always keeping an eye out for the authorities. Berger has never ceased to write about the people most writers neither know nor care about; his voice (or rather voices), his authority and his compassion are unique. And it's maybe the best book ever written with a dog as narrator, too.
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful
Another Wonder from Berger
2 Jun 1999
Format:Hardcover
John Berger has always been on the cutting edge of language and ideas. He is a sort of exile from all the terminal hipness of literature. He is brave and provocative and he continually questions the order of things. He writes from a deep inner need, in order to say things all over again, as if they have never been told before. This novel, King, is a marvellous movement on from his novel "To the Wedding." It reads as a contemporary myth but I never once doubt the authenticity of voice -- which is strange, since the book is ostensibly narrated by a dog. Berger is in top form. Read this fiercely important book.
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful
A Person Could Not
9 Feb 2001
Format:Paperback
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.
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