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Berg (British Literature) (Paperback)

by Quin (Author), Ann (Author)
4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
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Product details

  • Paperback: 168 pages
  • Publisher: DALKEY ARCHIVE PRESS; 1st Dalkey edition (10 Dec 2001)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 1564783022
  • ISBN-13: 978-1564783028
  • Product Dimensions: 21.4 x 14 x 1.4 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 193,496 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

Product Description

Against the backdrop of a gritty seaside town, an absurd and brutal plot develops involving three characters: Alistair Berg, his father and their mutual mistress. In his attempt to kill his father, Berg mutilates a ventriloquist's dummy, almost falls victim to his father's mistaken sexual advances and is relentlessly taunted by a group of tramps. Disturbing and at times startlingly comic, Berg chronicles the interrelations among these three characters as they circle one another in an escalating spiral of violence.
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Customer Reviews

3 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
4.7 out of 5 stars (3 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars A beautifully rendered and executed novel, 10 Jan 2008
By Mr. J. R. Evison (London, UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
The fact that Ann Quin is not as well known as the likes of Beckett, Robbe-Grillet, and the recently 'rediscovered' BS Johnson, is a travesty - in fact, an injustice. This is a sublime novel that uses the 'nouveau roman' principle of writing with the same degree of success as Robbe-Grillet and Duras. It has one of the great opening sequences of post-war fiction, and the fact that it is not better know is a pity.

With publishing houses currently bloated with historical novels and middle-brow bourgeois 'Booker' writers, novels like Berg delight and crackle with their eccentricites and experimentations. It feels so edgy and on the pulse that it seems odd that it wasn't written yesterday.

It is a shame that innovators such as Joyce and Beckett are held in high esteem while writers such as Alan Burns, Eva Figes, Christine Brooke-Rose and Quin are ignored. But with the republication of two Figes novels and Quin's novels currently in print, maybe the balance will soon be redressed - at least to a significantly minor extent.

My advice, if you are at all interested in experimental fiction, is to go out and buy these novels while they are in print. They represent a Brutalist format that could have heralded a new and exciting era in the British novel long before the dull, fluffy parochial balderdash which currently sits on a certain high street store was endlessly pumped out.

So read Quin, and become off-beat.
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5.0 out of 5 stars Ugly Beautiful, 29 Jan 2008
By Mr. P. Rigby "sharkgun" (wigan, england) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
I was introduced to 'Berg' after reading Stewart Home's '69 Things...' my curiosity getting the better of me I dived straight into the book and was totally thrilled by the experience.

Quin writes in a believable male voice, a soul uncomfortable with himself and the world he lives in. A quintessential outsider, a standard for the cult classic. But this novel is by no means all we've seen before...

From start to finish, Quin dances on the fine paradoxical line of absurdist and believability. Staging situations of farce and black humour with great verve. Surrealism is a constant theme, Freudian motifs echo in the space between the words, the prose drips with symbolism but (and this is the most important but) this is never pretentious.

It was a member of DEVO who said that only the middle classes had the time to be great artists. Well, he obviously never read 'BERG'.

Dreamy, magically realistic language constructs an environment that at times seems close to Alice's Wonderland but it never loses the grit of a sweaty boarding house.

This is a wonderful book for so many reasons. Forget the idea that Ballard is the heir of Burroughs, Ann Quin is unmistakably English yet drives prose on into the future, ugly-beautiful language for the society that realises it's a bunch of chimps at a tea party.
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0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Ann Quin's First Novel, 14 Jun 2006
By hj (London) - See all my reviews
A man tracks down the father he never knew and, concealing his identity, befriends his father and has an affair with his father's mistress.

Ann Quin's first novel was a big success in 1964 & remains her best known book. The plot is a characteristic 60s mix of lowlife absurd (Beckett, Pinter) & symbolism (Freud, Laing). In one scene the drunken father tries to rape the son who has dressed up in the father's mistress's clothes! And then there's some creepy perversity concerning a ventriloquist's dummy.... Although of its time & betraying some of the over-ripe awkwardness of a first novel, the extraordinary quality of Ann Quin's writing retains its disturbing power today. If you find the attempts of today's Brit-Lit novelists to write "at the edge" laughably obvious & shallow, then read some Ann Quin for the real thing.
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