Berger is a Booker prize winner, art critic, journalist, essayist and the acclaimed author of Ways of Seeing
. His latest is an epistolary novel that concerns two characters: Xavier, the alleged founder of a terrorist cell, and A’ida, his lover. The letters are A’ida’s, written to Xavier over the course of his years of imprisonment and squirreled away in a corner of Xavier’s small cell. They are adorned by Xavier’s margin notes (ranging from political exclamations to quotations about love and longing) and A’ida’s sketches. Through A’ida’s letters, the reader gets a taste of daily life in the provincial village of Suse, where she works in a pharmacy. Though she puts on a happy face for Xavier, tanks and helicopters haunt the margins, and she drops coded hints that she may still be involved in the resistance. The letters are organized idiosyncratically, but by virtue of their disorder, Berger tanks the standard-issue long-distance love plot and instead provides a rich narrative that winds together the toll on a town besieged and of isolation on a romance; it’s a paean to protest, both political and romantic. (Sept.)
