To the Wedding

Informationen zum Autor John Berger Klappentext Booker Prize-winning author John Berger gives a novel both tragic and joyous, intelligent and erotic. In To the Wedding , a blind Greek peddler tells the story of the wedding between a fellow peddler and his bride in a remarkable series of vivid and telling vignettes. As the book cinematically moves from one character's perspective to another, events and characters move toward the convergence of the wedding--and a haunting dance of love and death.Wonderful a fistful of snow in the mouths of men suffering summer heat Wonderful the spring winds for mariners who long to set sail And more wonderful still the single sheet over two lovers on a bed. I like quoting ancient verses when the occasion is apt. I remember most of what I hear, and I listen all day but sometimes I do not know how to fit everything together. When this happens I cling to words or phrases which seem to ring true. In the quartier around Plaka, which a century or so ago was a swamp and is now where the market is held, I'm called Tsobanakos. This means a man who herds sheep. A man from the mountains. I was given this name on account of a song. Each morning before I go to the market I polish my black shoes and brush the dust off my hat which is a Stetson. There is a lot of dust and pollution in the city and the sun makes them worse. I wear a tie too. My favourite is a flashy blue and white one. A blind man should never neglect his appearance. If he does, there are those who jump to false conclusions. I dress like a jeweller and what I sell in the market are tamata. Tamata are appropriate objects for a blind man to sell for you can recognise one from another by touch. Some are made of tin, others of silver and some of gold. All of them are as thin as linen and each one is the size of a credit card. The word tama comes from the verb t?zo, to make an oath. In exchange for a promise made, people hope for a blessing or a deliverance. Young men buy a tama of a sword before they do their military service, and this is a way of asking: May I come out of it unhurt. Or something bad happens to somebody. It may be an illness or an accident. Those who love the person who is in danger make an oath before God that they will perform a good act if the loved one recovers. When you are alone in the world, you can even do it for yourself. Before my customers go to pray, they buy a tama from me and put a ribbon through its hole, then they tie it to the rail by the ikons in the church. Like this they hope God will not forget their prayer. Into the soft metal of each tama is pressed an emblem of the part of the body in danger. An arm or a leg, a stomach or a heart, hands, or, as in my case, a pair of eyes. Once I had a tama on which a dog was embossed, but the priest protested and maintained that this was a sacrilege. He understands nothing, this priest. He has lived all his life in Athens, so he doesn't know how in the mountains a dog can be more important, more useful than a hand. He can't imagine that the loss of a mule may be worse than a leg which does not heal. I quoted the Evangelist to him: Consider the ravens: they do not sow or reap, they have no storeroom or barn. Yet God feeds them . . . When I told him this, he pulled at his beard and turned his back as if on the Devil. Bouzouki players have more to say than priests about what men and women need. What I did before I went blind, I'm not going to tell you. And if you had three guesses they'd all be wrong. The story begins last Easter. On the Sunday. It was mid-morning and there was a smell of coffee in the air. The smell of coffee drifts farther when the sun is out. A man asked me whether I had anything for a daughter. He spoke in broken English. A baby? I enquired. She's a woman now. Where is she suffering? I asked. Every...

Product details

• Authors: J. Berger, John Berger
• Publisher: Vintage USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 19.03.1996
• EAN: 9780679767770
• ISBN: 978-0-679-76777-0
• No. of pages: 201
• Dimensions: 130 mm x 203 mm x 14 mm
• Series: Vintage International; Vintage International
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature