The Red Tenda of Bologna: John Berger (Penguin Modern)

A perfect book to drop into on a daily basis. Such a delicately moving little book. Everyone should keep a copy near them

I really loved this. It's not just a word painting of a city - although it is that. There is a lovely wistfulness about the work; pages broken up into short paragraphs, wandering backwards and forward, memory and expectation. We touch on food, architecture, history and red. The sense of lost uncles and chance meetings. Very much worth a purchase - if you can find a copy!

A charming pocket-size book that uncovers and distills the essence of Bologna. Perfect read for a short visit. Makes you look at the city differently.

This text can be ingested at a single draught. But a sense of it might for ever linger. Roughly the size of somebody's hand, this little book contains just ninety-nine pages. But the text is far shorter than even this number would suggest. For, what varies about these pages is the amount of text displayed on each. Sometimes a single sentence appears; sometimes just a word. Why this eking out of Berger's text? Is this just gratuitous? The more typical case is where some six or seven lines cover less than a third of the page and the rest is given up to its own ivory whiteness. In just a score of instances here and there dispersed throughout the book the remaining blankness is rescued and embellished by an illustration. The drawings are the work of Paul Davis, whose simple materials, black ink, pen and brush, conjure, with immediacy, relish and artful clumsiness, the image of a single object; in most cases this is something small enough to be held in the hand. This is captured quite rapidly, as if the artist had crept up on it and surprised it. It appears as a slightly enriched silhouette; which simply floats there on the page's surface without background or border. Some of these objects are mementos of Berger's favourite uncle: his spectacles, a pair of bicycle-clips, a typewriter... The way these are presented is emblematic of rapport: suggesting the quiet, open-eyed sincerity of someone you trust. As we look at the object it seems to look back. Berger's text begins with a description of this uncle (`a man of independent means' intellectually-speaking, but of modest enough income), who, as avid letter-writer, reader, and traveller, played a special part in the formation of the writer's own interests. Berger's brief description could serve as his deceased uncle's memorial; and this is equally an account of the rapport between the older and younger man: their special, almost conspiratorial exchanges; the surprises they shared on occasional travels together. Following the introductory evocation of the man himself, Berger takes us to Bologna, a city his uncle once visited. Areas and aspects of the city and its story are lightly touched in; as blended into the writer's watchful, dreamy engagement with the happenstance and evanescence of this particular day. All this is achieved unhurriedly. There is enough time. Indeed, time and history are topics under consideration. The writer has no pressing business in Bologna but busies himself just the same. His contract with the city is to notice things; to turn things over in his mind, to be a passionate witness. We are in no doubt that Berger speaks to us personally, or even that he betrays some discreet urgency. Certainly, he seems grateful for the reader's company; even if the distantly hovering uncle claims part of his attention. The very sparing allocation of text to the upper region of each page, and the blankness of the page's lower portion suggest that a higher than usual concentration of `reader-attention' is urged for. But this attention is a two-way stretch; Berger is like the helpful speaker, who often momentarily breaks off; providing silences that will allow the listener to reel back and so catch up on - or perhaps enquire into - what has just been said. Even taking things at so leisurely a pace, the reader is likely to turn the pages more speedily than when reading a more traditional work of fiction with its more densely covered pages. Nevertheless, there is the sense, here, of a two-directional pull. And, this more conscious pacing of the writer-reader alliance is integral to what is going on at other levels. Berger's peculiar gearing of the text betokens the way relationship, also rhythm, motion, touch and a combination of other senses, feed into thought and become a necessary part of the telling and seeing. And, by coming alongside the reader in this way, the author can also more readily imply the presence of others; including those absent: both the living and the departed. Accordingly, a range of related sentiments and emotions thread their way through the text, re-routing its action and adumbrating its meanings. Not least because of the city's not so distant history, it is apt that the chosen context for all this should be modern Bologna. Imagine, on the other hand, some early Italian fresco, where the painter attends to the spaces and figures around the saint with an attention and diligence no less rapt and sincere than those lavished on the saintly figure itself: likewise, Berger never neglects the shift of give-and-take between subject and context. If the suggestion, here, is that life is properly lived and discovered through a chain of relationship, context, engagement, transaction and change then this is also precisely what we find here; again and again. This is repeatedly renewed in the uncanny moments when one or another of Berger's passing descriptions seems to follow the very grain of what it describes. Yet, `the give-and-take between subject and context' (which is the medium and whole sense of what we inhabit) is here and now projected, somewhat eerily, as an additional figure in its own right: one that stands out from Nature; like a martyr; claiming attention on its own terms.