G. was published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in 1972, winning the Booker Prize — half of which Berger famously donated to the Black Panthers, and the other half to funding research into migrant workers (the subject of his next book). The novel is one of the most remarkable works of experimental fiction of its decade — a narrative that systematically refuses the conventions of the novel while remaining deeply engaged with story, character, and desire.
The protagonist, G., is the illegitimate son of an Italian merchant and an English woman, born in 1888. He is a Don Juan — a figure of inexhaustible erotic desire who moves through the political upheavals of early twentieth-century Europe (the Italian Risorgimento’s aftermath, the class rigidities of Edwardian England, World War I, the Alpine frontier between Italy and Austria). But the novel’s treatment of his desire is neither romantic nor satirical — it is analytical, attentive, and interruptive: Berger repeatedly breaks the narrative to reflect on what he is doing, to question the conventions he is using, to address the reader directly about the relationship between desire and politics, between private experience and historical force.
The novel’s form embodies Berger’s conviction that no aspect of human experience is separable from its historical moment — that desire is shaped by class, that sex is political, that even the most intimate act occurs within systems of power. The interruptions are not alienation effects for their own sake but insistences that the reader remain conscious of the relationship between the story and the world.
Collecting G.
First edition (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1972): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First UK edition in dust jacket: $50–$150
- Signed first edition: $100–$300
- US first (Viking, 1972): $30–$80
- Without jacket: $10–$25