- Paperback: 202 pages
- Publisher: Vintage Books; 1st Vintage International Ed edition (1 May 1999)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0679767770
- ISBN-13: 978-0679767770
- Product Dimensions: 20.4 x 13.2 x 1.4 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,804,337 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Review
'To The Wedding is one of the greatest and most honest love stories of our time. It does what all great literature can and should do -- we become alive in bodies, stories, histories, geographies not our own. We are given a new lease on life through an imaginative act. If I ever pack up my books, this novel will not go into a box, rather I will slip it into my overcoat and carry it with me wherever I happen to be' Colum McCann 'No one knows more about the necessity of love than John Berger: what love makes us capable of, and incapable of. This is a book of the most precise humanity. No one who reads it will forget what it makes us understand: every action has its twin, conscionable or unconscionable; every truth, its shadow in the world; everything lost, alive in love' Anne Michaels 'A masterpiece a novel that will haunt you' Sunday Telegraph '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
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
Product Description
A blind Greek peddler tells the story of the wedding between a fellow peddler and his bride in a remarkable series of vivid and telling vignettes. As the book cinematically moves from one character's perspective to another, events and characters move toward the convergence of the wedding--and a haunting dance of love and death.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Somehow, this was less like a novel and more like you had stumbled into the pain and joy of someone else's life.
It is a beautifully constructed tale of love and the pain of bereavement told through the characters as they slowly reveal their stories on the way to the daughters wedding. As each story is woven into the other , the warp into the weft, it creates a whole that is both beautiful and yet flawed because the ending of the story is known and unchangeable.I found this a powerful, poignant and beautiful read.
It is a beautifully constructed tale of love and the pain of bereavement told through the characters as they slowly reveal their stories on the way to the daughters wedding. As each story is woven into the other , the warp into the weft, it creates a whole that is both beautiful and yet flawed because the ending of the story is known and unchangeable.I found this a powerful, poignant and beautiful read.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
TO THE WEDDING is a remarkably beautiful novel that works through a series of fluid images and as the blind narrator says at the beginning, he (and the reader) has to determine how to fit a them all together. It's a book that cries out for several readings, as one reading will not do justice to the way these images are subtly linked.
It's a story of life's transience, of terrible things happening to innocent people There are two ways of responding to such injustices, the first being a futile religious practice, as exemplified by the narrator who sells "tomatas" at the beginning of the story to ward off evil happenings. The second is simply to realize that bad things happen to good people and to celebrate the present moment, the climax of this attitude being, of course, the wedding of two ordinary people.
The wedding guests become "a creature half mythical like a satyr with thirty heads. It only lives a day or two, and is reborn when there's something to be celebrated". This promise of happiness, and that's all it is, a "promise" is further intensified by the food (the sacrificial lamb) and by the bsnd which plays loud "to keep out the din of the world." The din, the discordant notes, the tragedy will come soon enough. But for now, we enjoy the beauty of the moment.
It's a story of life's transience, of terrible things happening to innocent people There are two ways of responding to such injustices, the first being a futile religious practice, as exemplified by the narrator who sells "tomatas" at the beginning of the story to ward off evil happenings. The second is simply to realize that bad things happen to good people and to celebrate the present moment, the climax of this attitude being, of course, the wedding of two ordinary people.
The wedding guests become "a creature half mythical like a satyr with thirty heads. It only lives a day or two, and is reborn when there's something to be celebrated". This promise of happiness, and that's all it is, a "promise" is further intensified by the food (the sacrificial lamb) and by the bsnd which plays loud "to keep out the din of the world." The din, the discordant notes, the tragedy will come soon enough. But for now, we enjoy the beauty of the moment.
11 of 14 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
One of the best books I have ever read. It really moved me and I cried in the end, which I don’t usually do.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Poetic, sensitive and beautiful prose
To the Wedding tells an almost unbearable story of love, hope and sadness. There can be few more humane writers than John Berger. Read more
Published 5 months ago by Reader
A beatiful book
This is an incredibly beautiful book: through the ears of a blind Greek the disturbed love of a young French woman and her Italian friend is described. Read more
Published on 29 Nov 1998
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