G.

G. is born in Livorno to an Italian merchant and an American mother, illegitimate, and raised by cousins in England. He grows into a seducer, and the novel follows him across Europe in the years before the First World War, through affairs conducted with a directness that ignores every social arrangement in his path: a married woman in Milan during the riots of 1898, the wife of a Hungarian businessman in Trieste, an aviator's admirer at the moment Chavez crosses the Alps. Berger is not writing a picaresque romance. He interrupts constantly, breaking into essay, diagram and direct address, arguing about the nature of sexual desire, about what a woman's experience of her own body is under the conditions of that society, about the impossibility of describing an event and the politics of trying. The historical settings are chosen for the moments where the old order is visibly cracking. It is a difficult, argumentative, deliberately fragmented book, more admired than loved, and its author gave half the prize money to the Black Panthers while criticising the sponsor's Caribbean holdings from the podium.