Bento's Sketchbook

by Berger, John

• ISBN13: 9780307379955
• ISBN10: 0307379957
• eBook ISBN(s): 9780307906922
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-11-08
• Publisher: Pantheon

Summary

From the author of the modern classics Ways of Seeing and To the Wedding ( ;Wherever I live in the world . . . I have this book with me. ;- Michael Ondaatje), a singularly conceived, beautifully written consideration of how we can refresh the way we perceive our world. Over the last half century, John Berger has created a body of work like no other, distinguished, as Susan Sontag wrote, by its ;attentiveness to the sensual world with responsiveness to the imperatives of conscience. ; In Bento's Sketchbook Berger continues his exploration of the relationship between experience and expression, giving us a book of dazzling, inventive, and, ultimately, deeply moving impressions of how stories embedded in visual art provide us with the impetus to see and understand our world in extra-ordinary ways. Using as his jumping-off point the sketchbooks of the great philosopher Baruch Spinoza-books believed to exist but never found-Berger moves between his own quotidian experience of seeing and the imagined experience of Spinoza in a narrative that weaves its own surprising, poignant picture, inviting us to contemplate the mystery of what and how we see.