John Berger

Born to an Italian father and his American mistress, G. becomes, in the years before the First World War, a modern Don Juan

A Novel

Melody Izard

An enjoyable enough book with a quirky way of both presenting the story (through some unidentified narrator) and telling the story (shifting back and forth between what G (the protagonist) is thinking and what the narrator is observing). It is set in pre-World War I Europe and is the story of a serial lover who may or may not be involved in the resistance, but probably is not – more than likely he is simply trying to add another man’s wife to his list of conquests and cares nothing for the political turmoil going on around him. There are very odd little descriptions of sexual goings on throughout the book including a couple of drawings. For instance this one where Marika is watching G dance with Nusa and sees his erect penis and imagines him on a stick horse:

  On this stick he rode towards her, his legs and feet dangling either side. His arms were raised the better to keep his balance as he rode. In bed, seen from above or from the side, a penis looks like an object or a vegetable or a fish. His, during the waltz, was indefinable. It was red. It was thrust forward in the direction of its own progress. Its head shifted a little from side to side, as a horse’s head when galloping. Often it was so acutely foreshortened that its body became invisible. All she saw was a darkness with a glowing ember at the entrance to it. She could smell the sulphur, she told herself, and it was making her feel giddy.

G. A Novel