here is where we meet John Berger Bloomsbury (UK) ISBN 0747573174 hardcover, 256 pages $36 (CDN)

In an article published recently in The Guardian Jonathan Coe writes about a key moment in the life of British novelist BS Johnson, the subject of his Booker winning biography, Like A Fiery Elephant:

In the early 1960s, as an impoverished poet forced to earn his living by supply teaching, [Johnson] proceeded to write a novel, Albert Angelo, about an impoverished architect forced to earn his living by supply teaching. But he grew increasingly dissatisfied with this deception, and the book concludes with a howl of authorial self-disgust: “Oh, fuck all this LYING!”

From then on, Johnson refused to “make things up” in his novels. His disgruntled publisher wanted to market them as autobiography and facetiously asked him, “Aren’t you rather young to be writing your memoirs?” But Johnson was adamant: “The two terms ‘novel’ and ‘fiction’ are not synonymous,” he wrote in 1966. “The novel is a form in the same sense that the sonnet is a form; within that form, one may write truth or fiction. I choose to write truth in the form of a novel.”

John Berger’s new collection here is where we meet contains truth in the form of stories. The book’s eight and a half pieces are described as “fictions” by the publisher but they could equally be read as fragments of autobiography. In “Lisboa” the narrator, a man named John of Berger’s age and interests, encounters his mother, dead for fifteen years. “The thing you should know is this:”, she tells him, “the dead don’t stay where they are buried.”

The dead in here is where we meet are not ghosts, they move among the living as equals. In “Kraków”, while walking through an open market in the Place Nowy, the narrator meets Ken, an older man who had been a profound influence on him when they were both younger. The narrator is old now and Ken is dead, although “I never knew exactly when or how he died”, and in that market square they continue their conversations casually, as if life and afterlife were one.

The effect is a wonderful, sustained mood of mild melancholy, of reminiscence and reflection. But Berger’s melancholy is leavened with a generous amount of hope, something which distinguishes his work from that of W. G. Sebald, whose pages are also peopled by departed souls.

In “The Szum and The Ching” the narrator shares and celebrates the lives of two of his friends, Polish immigrants in France; it is a perfect example of the empathy and insight which Berger has brought to previous depictions of the European working class: French peasants eking out a living in the “Into Their Labours” trilogy; migrant workers dealing with racism and loneliness in A Seventh Man.

“The Szum and The Ching” is the heart of the entire book. The text is in fragments of one line to half a dozen pages in length which give glimpses into the lives of Mirek and Danka, the story ranging backwards and forwards in time as the narrator drives across Europe to their home in “the village of Górecko in the south-east of what is named Little Poland, twenty kilometres from the Ukranian border.” Mirek and Danka have just been married and when the narrator — John — reaches their home he will make sorrel soup to welcome them when they arrive.

A woman with a white scarf around her head is approaching the bridge over the Szum, carrying two buckets of freshly dug potatoes. When just taken from the earth, potatoes glow. They glow like hen’s eggs. The woman is perspiring. I recognize her from my other visits. She is Bogena, who looks after Mirek’s garden and, in exchange, takes the vegetables and flowers she needs. Due to the river, the soil is richer here than in the village proper across the road. And so Bogena keeps chickens in her own garden and cultivates Mirek’s. In the room where I’m sleeping, I’ll hear, far away, her cock crowing before it is light.

What is truly wonderful about this piece — and it is a testimony to John Berger’s patience and his skill — is how these fragments slowly meld themselves together in the reader’s mind, merging, overlapping and blending into a small masterpiece of a story, just as the ingredients of a sorrel soup combine to produce a meal which is so much more than its constituent parts.

Characters and themes recur throughout here is where we meet and knit the eight and a half pieces into a greater, emotionally rewarding whole. In the brief “half” piece which ends the book the narrator describes a final encounter with his mother, neatly bringing things full circle and making me want to read the entire book again.

It has been a long time since I’ve read a book which I’ve enjoyed as thoroughly as this one. here is where we meet is full of vivid, heartfelt writing, and you’ll want to read it slowly in order to savour every page.