Berg

by Ann Quin, Jerzy Jarniewicz (Translator), Katarzyna Bazarnik (Afterword)

„Pewien człowiek o nazwisku Berg, które zmienił na Greb, przyjechał do nadmorskiego miasteczka, żeby zabić ojca…”
– tak zaczyna się debiutancka powieść Ann Quin, arcydzieło brytyjskiej powojennej prozy awangardowej. Berg jest jednocześnie czarną komedią, dramatem psychologicznym, thrillerem i erotykiem, jak też śmiałą próbą reinterpretacji mitu o Edypie. Historia Alistaira Berga – pełnego sprzeczności mężczyzny, który nie potrafi uporać się z przeszłością ani uwolnić spod wpływu nieobecnego w jego życiu ojca, a także matki, której słowa „mieszają mu szmery w głowie” – podąża w najmniej spodziewanych kierunkach. To proza duszna od zapachu słodyczy, toniku do włosów i mokrego futra, jej język, gęsty i plastyczny, oscyluje między kunsztowną metaforą a niewyszukanym żartem.
Powieść Quin dryfuje, niesiona nonsensownym humorem oraz ciemnymi nurtami wyobraźni.

Genres: Fiction, British Literature, Novels, Literature, Literary Fiction, 20th Century, Womens

Paperback

First published January 1, 1964

About the author

Ann Quin (1936-1973) was a British writer noted for her experimental style. The author of Berg (1964), Three (1966), Passages (1969) and Tripticks (1972), she committed suicide in 1973 at the age of 37.

Quin came from a working-class family and was educated at the Convent of the Blessed Sacrament. She trained as a shorthand typist and worked in a solicitor's office, then at a publishing company when she moved to Soho and began writing novels.

Despite a complete re-print of her works by the Dalkey Archive Press, Quin's work has yet to see the critical attention many people claim it deserves.

Reviews

[Guille · Rating 5 out of 5]

No he encontrado ni un solo comentario a la novela que no citara su primera frase y la calificara de icónica o de una de las mejores primeras frases de la historia de la literatura. Pues bien, bueno o malo, al menos que mi comentario destaque por no incluirla. En su lugar, citaré otra menos llamativa, pero que a mí me parece que viene muy a cuento de lo que es esta novela.

“…no es el material sino la manera de vender el artículo lo que cuenta”

El material se puede contar en pocas líneas. Alistair Berg, que se hace llamar Greb, fue “Un niño difícil y enfermizo que anhelaba ser aceptado por los demás, por quienes estaban sanos, fuertes, se pavoneaban engalanados con brillantina en el pelo”. Solo tenía a su sobreprotectora madre, a quién su marido abandonó siendo Berg muy pequeño. Vivían con estrecheces, aunque Berg siempre tuvo grandes sueños y la esperanza de cumplirlos algún día.

“Los puños y el cuello de tu camisa manchados y roídos, el trasero remendado, tus zapatos chapoteando en el barro. Pero una vez a solas, cuando mandabas con la bestia y la flor a zancadas por las colinas, amparado por un orden natural, una sensualidad pausada que el sol envolví, cabalgaba el viento a través de los herbosos bosques, entonces nada importaba, porque todo comprendía tu relevancia"

Era de los que creían que podía dominar su destino. Ahora trabaja como vendedor de pelucas y tónico capilar y ha sabido por pura casualidad del paradero de su padre, a quién odia profundamente y le hace responsable de su patética vida. Es el momento de aniquilar el mundo antiguo y renacer en el nuevo: va a matar a su padre.

“El sentido trágico del destino es inherente a todo hombre; pero yo desafío al hado, yo soy el único responsable de cada acción, de cada escena; desde mi nada crearé la idea, contemplaré lo que he imaginado y solo de ahí brotará la totalidad de mis actos”

Pero esto, con ser atrayente, no es ni mucho menos lo que hace grande a esta novela. El texto es tortuoso, poético, duro, sórdido a la vez que hermoso, repleto de situaciones cómicas, algunas patéticas, también erótico y hasta violento, vanguardista, simbólico, muchas veces críptico y con numerosas claves (para mí) ocultas (algunas son explicadas por los traductores, a los que desde aquí felicito por su labor, pero apostaría algo a que ni de lejos agotaron todas las referencias). Una tercera persona que rápidamente vira hacia la corriente de conciencia y que incluye diálogos en un curso continuo que no hace distingos, “pensamientos y sueños que escapan juntos y forman un todo, un universo entero que conformo yo solo”, una mente delirante propensa a la paranoia que se desarrolla entre lo grotesco y lo macabro en una historia edípica, fáustica, shakesperiana, freudiana con algo de tragedia griega, seriamente absurda y divertidísima. Todo esto en una primera novela que la autora escribió con tan solo 28 años, corría el año 1964.

“Alistair Berg, alias Greb, viajante de comercio, vendedor de pelucas, de tónico capilar, amante paranoico, ¿se declara culpable? Sí. Culpable de todo aquello que la condición humana trae consigo; culpable de entregarme en exceso; culpable de defenderme; de defraudar a otros; culpable de amor; de amar demasiado, o no lo suficiente; culpable de actos provincianos, de cumplir deseos universales; de martirio consciente; de masoquismo inconsciente”

Llegué a este libro porque el vendedor de segunda mano de Hotel Splendid tenía este en su catálogo, me pareció interesante y, de paso, me permitía amortizar los gastos de envío. Hay veces que los libros le eligen a uno en lugar de ser al revés. Cuanto me alegro de que este me escogiera.

[Hugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'll try to keep this short, as I don't have anything very fresh to say about this cult classic of 60s experimental fiction, Ann Quin's debut novel, which was republished earlier this year by And Other Stories.

The first line is justifiably famous, and gets a page to itself: "A man called Berg, who changed his name to Greb, came to a seaside town intending to kill his father".

What follows is more of an acquired taste, a farcical nightmare story in which the boundaries between reality and Berg's feverish imagination are not always clear. The writing is impressive throughout, but I struggled a little to find any sympathy for any of the three main characters. An interesting read nonetheless.

[Fionnuala]

I read this book because Claire-Louise Bennett spoke about it in Checkout 19.
Berg is a very strange reading experience. It reminded me of four very different but equally strange reading experiences, Ice, Brighton Rock, Crime and Punishment and Pedro Páramo which are all highlights of my reading life. Berg joins them.

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

A man called Berg, who changed his name to Greb, came to a seaside town intending to kill his father.

And Other Stories 2018 publication of The Unmapped Country: Stories and Fragments has refocused attention on experimental British novelist Ann Quin, who committed suicide in 1973 aged just 37, who was best known for her 1964 debut Berg.

The story has Alistair (‘Aly’) Charles Humphrey Berg, born 1931, a young and rather unsuccessful hair-tonic salesman, coming to Brighton where he has tracked down his scoundrel of a father, who he last saw, when he was a child, 28 years ago. Concealing his identity by the simple expedient of changing his name to Greb, he takes up lodgings in a room next door to his father’s, fully intending to commit patricide.

But a tangled tale follows. Berg finds himself becoming infatuated with his father’s younger lover, and confused, when pursuing his planned vengeance, between the old man and a tailor’s dummy his father apparently uses in a vaudeville act, which at different times is mistaken for a Bonfire Night Guy and a dead body. A budgie and a cat are some of the collateral casualties of the escalating violence resulting from the seedy love triangle between son, roguish father and the flirtatious middle-aged lover of both. The other key character is Brighton itself, recognisable from landmarks but transformed into something eerie and dream-like yet at the same time earthy and sordid, the sea a menacing presence, and the town mainly populated, in the winter season with tourists long gone, by a disturbing and depraved group of tramps. And the story is told in a rather opaque style, with speech mark-less and unattributed direct speech mixed in with stream-of-consciousness brooding as well as more conventional descriptions of, at times almost farcical, action, and with prose that switches from the grubby to the lyrical and back again. A strikingly lyrical piece reads:

‘You castle-bound, spying on princesses, honey-gold, singing against the blue, if touched surely their skin would ooze? Aware of own smell, skin-texture, sun in eyes, lips, toes, the softness underneath, in between, wondering what miracle made you, the sky, the sea. Conscious of sound, gulls hovering, crying, or silent at rarer intervals, their swift turns before being swallowed by the waves. Then no sound, all suddenly would be soundless, treading softly, dividing rocks with fins, and sword-fish fingers plucking away clothes, that were left with your anatomy, huddled like ruffled birds waiting. A chrysalis heart formed on the water’s surface, away from the hard-polished pebbles, sand-blowing and elongated shadows. Away, faster than air itself, dragon-whirled.

Berg’s back story is gradually inferred from the reader by snatches of correspondence from Berg’s mother, still seemingly in love with her errant and long absent husband and with whom Berg the son has a rather devoted but troubling relationship, adding to the Oedipal undertones.

Alistair Berg, alias Greb, commercial traveller, seller of wigs, hair-tonic, paranoiac paramour, do you plead guilty? Yes. Guilty of all things the human condition brings; guilty of being too committed; guilty of defending myself; of defrauding others; guilty of love; loving too much, or not enough; guilty of parochial actions, of universal wish-fulfilments; of conscious martyrdom; of unconscious masochism. Idle hours, fingers that meddle. Alistair Charles Humphrey Greb, alias Berg, you are condemned to life imprisonment until such time you may prove yourself worthy of death.

The novel was consciously influenced by the French structuralists and while one rather snarky review in the NYRB stated this “would have been avant-garde ... in 1922”, I was struck by how different it felt, particularly for an English language novel, an ideal Goldsmiths Prize candidate had the prize then existed, and it was no surprise to find that this year’s judge Deborah Levy nominated it as her Fantasy Goldsmiths Prize winner from the past:

Quin was an avant-garde British writer, working class, art school. Berg was the novel in which Quin put to work, in a very British way, her homage to the Nouveau Roman novelists she admired - with the bonus of humour and a ventriloquist's dummy that comes to a sticky end. Berg exported its oedipal themes and new literary grammar to seedy 60s Brighton in a vision that Hitchcock would have relished.
https://www.gold.ac.uk/goldsmiths-pri...

At times the novel feels a little too self-consciously experimental, and, when Quin switches to the more lyrical of her registers, somewhat artificial. But a vivid, intense and disturbing work, one that lingers after the page has been turned. and one worthy of the re-attention Quin’s novels are now receiving. 3.5 stars rounded up to 4.

[Nate D · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reading Ann Quin's mad, brilliant final novel Tripticks, I was often struck by her uniquely garbled diction, a thick, high-modern mess of interior thoughts and memories blended into exterior details and actions, past and present and the entirely imagined mingling on every page. But in Tripticks, mingling also with a huge array of intruding outside material, brochures and pulp synopses and magazine texts, which I thought might account for the garbledness. But no, even here, in her first novel, whose entire text is apparently its own, nearly every paragraph lurches, flailing, through mind and landscape and personal history. It's disorienting, it certainly keeps you on your toes, but it's acutely perceptive and often wildly entertaining once you get the feel for it.

All the same, and despite the premise promise encapsulated in the famous first line ("A man called Berg, who changed his name to Greb, came to a seaside town intending to kill his father."), this didn't really feel as fine-honed as the later work. Though the dreary-mysterious off-season Brighton of the book -- the same in which Quin was to disappear into the ocean a decade later -- has its intrigues and muted fascinations, the single-mindedness of the protagonist narrows its interest somewhat. Berg is a Freudian archetype granted comedic-noir context, a maybe-murderer trapped in oedipal confusion between mother, father, and women in general. The strictness of the archetypes that he finds himself in squeeze some of the surprise out of the story's course, though it is not without its unexpected curves and absurdities. I think, actually, that the greater issue is just that in sticking to a familiar psychological case study, Quin drastically limits her satiric range narrowing the wit that would dash across the entire American landscape in Tripticks.

[Sentimental Surrealist · Rating 4 out of 5]

Let's do a little thought experiment. Nothing fancy, just a quick one. Imagine if Samuel Beckett decided he was going to rewrite Hamlet. However, imagine that he decided to rewrite Hamlet without tipping his hand that he was rewriting Hamlet. So that means no usurpers on the throne, no speeches in the graveyard, no ghosts, none of that. Instead, imagine that he took the two things that make Hamlet Hamlet, his indecisiveness and his much-discussed Oedipal issues, and made those the number one and number two factors of his rewrite.

Berg's setup is simple, stated right there on the first page: our eponymous hero changes his name to Greb and sets out to kill his father. That's about where the simple stuff ends, though. The reasons why Berg reverses his name are never explained, and Quin only offers hints as to why Greb gets into the patricide thing. The reader has to ferret a lot out of a book full of dense symbolism I have yet to work out - the mannequin, the parrot - strange events like Berg's father coming onto him, and an odd prose style that's not quite eloquent, not quite beautiful, but certainly worth your while.

This is one of those books that sort of spits in the face of literary interpretation, or at least that's my opinion, offering a bunch of paths that may or may not actually lead anywhere. Even the full extent of the Berg-as-Hamlet idea hasn't quite kicked in for me yet, so maybe I'm reviewing this a little prematurely. I imagine a book this strange will stick with me, though. Recommended for anyone who's into outre fiction. Dalkey Archive does a real stand-up job.

[Hux · Rating 2 out of 5]

If a Carry On film was turned into a stream-of-consciousness novel.

There are times when I read stream-of-consciousness novels and utterly despise them. Then there are times when I read stream-of-consciousness novels and find myself getting sucked in, lost in the narrative. Which of these two sensations I will experience seems to be arbitrary, random, and ultimately inexplicable. I slowly got into Land of Green Plums by Herta Muller and even found myself highly entertained by Christine Angot's Incest (a book many others seemed to hate). I don't know why I sometimes can be seduced and other times cannot, but the fact remains that when I dislike a stream-of-consciousness novel, I tend to absolutely loathe it with a passion!

Sadly, this comes under the latter category. Actually, that's not true, I didn't hate it, I simply didn't care enough for that. Instead I took this oddball story of a man tracking down his long lost father with the intention of killing him, and struggled to connect with its humour, its format, or its Freudian insights. Like I said, Carry on Camping but with an Oedipal complex and some cracking Blighty seaside smut (phwoar!!). But the writing appalled me. I simply hated it. The story is curious enough, with Berg finding his father shacked up with a younger woman whom he also fancies, his desire to kill him, the replacement of a clownish ventriloquist's doll, and all of this silliness saturated in quaint Britishisms and the endless presence of Brighton's piscatorial spoondrift. It's all rather interesting stuff but again... I come back to the writing. It simply infuriated me. Truth be told, even when I do like stream-of-consciousness, I only ever like it... never love it. Which is presumably why when I hate it... I truly, utterly, wholeheartedly, down to the marrow of my bones... despise it!

Fingers scratching the partition. Two beasts emerging, somewhere between head and belly; substantial food for only one, the third lingering, then leaps and devours everything, the remaining two face each other, which will die, the one above, or the one below? There I've lost interest in being the ring master, but shall I remain the impassive observer? Berg pressed himself against the partition, until it shuddered, and he thought someone coughed the other side, a rasping sound that - why yes unmistakable - and yet?

The above style either fills you with profound enjoyment or it sounds like the contrived mediocre nothing language of someone trying too hard. It can never be beautiful to me, too prosaic and obvious, too dependent upon the style above substance, the format, the delivery system, always taking precedent over the actual content. Sometimes this kind of writing might bring something to the table, but mostly it always seems (to me at least) to act as a method for masking what is, ultimately, a rather forgettable prose. And for some reason this kind of writing always feels strangely dated to me, as though the ideas of the experimental writers were, ironically, an expression of a specific time and place, weighed down by a psychology that is already redundant and archaic. The endless moments in the novel, for example, where his mother (a kind of floating consciousness in itself) witters on about wearing a warm coat or encourages him to mix with people. It was like Norman Bates hearing his mother telling him he's a dirty boy.

You either take an enormous amount of pleasure from this style of writing (independently of the story) or you don't. If you like stream-of-consciousness writing then there's a good chance you'll like this (think Ice by Kavan or The Limit by Rosalind Belben - two books I also did not care for). If, like me, however, your enjoyment of stream-of-consciousness is very hit and miss. Well, it's impossible to say if you'll like it or not. Go read it for yourself, I'm not your mother.

All I know is... I very muchly (MUCHLY) did not care for it.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ann Quin was a talented and ambitious writer, and this debut abounds in excellent sentences (when unmoored from the waffle of interior monologue or ridiculous dialogue), using various shifts in narrative position to create a palpable sense of desperation, farce, and bad blood. Like her compatriot B.S. Johnson, Quin is interested in black humour and showing human beings stripped of their pomp and defences, and somewhat revels in her dark worlds, even at their most OTT or mordant. The constant shifts from fixed narrator to internal monologue to varying narrator POVs to letters from Mumsie keeps the reader on her toes, however the plot itself is not so intriguing to prevent this reader sinking into an amused torpor and straining on to the climax (where the novel assumes an elegiac and oddly moving shade).

[Nick Grammos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like reading absurdist theatre. Berg changes his name to become Greb, goes to a seaside town to find his father and kill him. So, the theatrical staple of identity and deception is played out in an Oedipal subject.

Berg-Greb is a screwed-up guy. Depraved thoughts dovetail seamlessly with dialogue and endlessly shifting action. You really move along between fantasy and reality here.

Why does Berg want to kill his father? He’s a loser, his father is a bounder-loser who abandoned him as a baby. He’s shacked up with Judith, a divorcee, Berg as Greb becomes aroused by Judith, too. Why? He’s just kind of depraved, or craving love, or angry at his father.

There’s a ventriloquist dummy too that we identify with the father for a long time, too. It’s weird, circus-like, panto-like, absurd.

Mostly I sensed the menacing Harold Pinter like motivations of characters who act on impulses have understood and never fully explained to the audience. We know Berg is pissed at his father, and yet he craves his love too. But you can’t say that, which leads to theatrical action.

The language is terrific, never dull, always dynamic, vivid, thrilling. Ann Quin sadly was another tragic death of a writer too young from booze and being screwed up by someone once upon a time. Great to see enough people cared enough to bring her back on the stage.

[Laurent De Maertelaer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow, wow & wow.
Wo-o-o-o-w.

[Kansas · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Una semana en una ciudad extraña, pero sin mayores progresos: ni siquiera había abordado al viejo y tras todos aquellos años, las promesas, los planes, la persecución imaginaria tan éstáticos como un sueño del pasado. La hoja limpia de un cuchillo rebanando el tabique que me separa de ellos...”

La verdad es que no sé siquiera como empezar esta reseña de una novela que me ha tenido enganchada desde el momento en que la empecé ayer. Fue empezar y no parar y analizando este enganche no sé bien qué es lo que me ha tenido tan sumida porque la mayoría de la novela transcurre en la cabeza de Alistair Berg, el protagonista. Hay incluso momentos en los que no sabía si lo que estaba leyendo era real o solo transcurría en la cabeza de su protagonista (coincidencias con Mundo Hormiga, que también estaba leyendo al mismo tiempo). Lo cierto es que me ha maravillado la capacidad de Ann Quin para venderme una historia que funciona como una mezcla entre posmodernismo existencialista y comedia negra, que nunca se detiene, que continuamente está en movimiento aunque la meta no esté bien clara, lo que si está muy claro es cómo la conduce, casi como en un sueño medio paranoico.

Alistair Berg es un vendedor de tónicos para el pelo que alberga un odio acérrimo por su padre que los abandonó a él y a su madre cuando era pequeño. Berg, que decide buscar a su padre y matarlo, lo encuentra en un pueblo de la costa y hasta allí se traslada alquilando la habitación contigua a la suya en una casa de huéspedes. Para camuflarse se cambia el nombre por el de Greb. Con la única separación de un tabique, Berg es testigo de la vida que hay al otro lado, habitación que su padre comparte con su joven amante, Judith. Berg se convierte en un voyeur continuo con todo lo que esto implica también para su imaginación. Su desemedido odio a su padre planea uno y mil métodos para quitarlo de en medio y durante las ausencias de su padre traba relación con Judith, con todo lo que esto implica también.

Las intenciones parricidas de Berg se van complicando poco a poco, no sabemos bien si por su continua dispersión o porque realmente en el fondo no es ese su objetivo, confieso que es uno de los puntos que me mantuvo tan enganchada.... Del mismo modo que que tenía una imagen preconcebida de su padre, influenciado por una madre que aunque no vemos está continuamente marcándole en off, poco a poco va descubriendo a través de ese tabique detalles sobre él que le irán sorprendiendo: el ventrilocuo, el falso acento aristocrático, sus ausencias y el alcoholismo

Es interesante como Ann Quin va navegando durante la novela por diferentes estados, porque en momentos es una comedia medio negra con Berg transportando por media ciudad un cuerpo envuelto en una alfombra, o incluso transvistiéndose y sin embargo, a pesar de esa apariencia vaudevillesca, en el fondo encierra la profunda agonía de un ser humano que no encaja en ninguna parte En este aspecto me encanta el personaje de la madre, que como he dicho antes, nunca aparece pero sin embargo está continuamente presente (y poderosa) a través de los flashbacks de Berg y por supuesto a través de sus fragmentos de cartas, quizá estos sean los momentos en los que lector pueda descubrir cómo/quién es realmente Alistair Berg.

“Pero por qué se meten contigo Aly, qué es lo que has hecho, qué fue lo que dijiste, algo tuvo que ser, no pueden acosarte sin tener un motivo ¿no crees?
(...)
Dime que no es cierto, Aly, tú no harías algo así, quiero decir que tú no eres de esos, no mi niño, no mi propio hijo.”

Y tengo que mencionar la atmósfera de la historia que me ha maravillado. La historia transcurre en una ciudad costera; ciudades que suelen ser lugares frios y vacios cuando están fuera de estos periodos de vacaciones. Ann Quin le da a esta ciudad un tono medio inhóspito y asfixiante, lóbrego y sórdido por momentos; al igual que las habitaciones de la casa de huéspedes separados por estos tabiques que más parecen cortinas, o incluso las ventanas por la cual, la única posibilidad que queda es mirar el vacio. La novela comienza en una de estas ventanas y termina en una escena bastante similar, con otra ventana, nada cambia, todo es circular….la libertad por mucho que la persigas puede ser un ideal difícil de conseguir, y sin embargo, Ann Quin sí que es fascinante por esa libertad que maneja su estilo. Ha sido una de estas lecturas que te hacen salir de tu zona de confort pero merece la pena dejarse llevar. ¿Por qué Ann Quin sigue tan invisible?? Gracias a sus editores por hacerla visible. La traducción es de Ce Santiago.

“Alistair Berg, alias Gerb, viajante de comercio, vendedor de pelucas, de tónico capilar, amante paranoico, ¿se declara culpable? Sí. Culpable de todo aquello que la condición humana trae consigo, culpable de entregarme en exceso; culpable de defenderme, de defraudar a otros; culpable de amor; de amar demasiado, o no lo suficiente; culpable de actos provincianos, de cumplir deseos universales; de martirio consciente, de masoquismo inconsciente. Horas muertas, dedos inquietos. Alistair Charles Humphrey Greb, alias Berg…”

https://kansasbooks.blogspot.com/2022...

[Nathália · Rating 5 out of 5]

Often described as experimental, Ann Quin’s writing goes beyond the frame of a single terminology, refusing any clear cut definition. Her work is no less than strikingly original, where style and substance coexist in perfect equilibrium, as if marbled into one another. There is remarkable freshness to her paradoxical artistic coherence, which originates from fragmented reality that only exists in the depths of one’s mind. Speaking of mind, rather than a seaside town, Berg uses the protagonist’s mental space as its own highly atmospheric setting.

Although not explicit, Quin’s debut novel offers a glimpse into the author’s personal life and struggles, especially concerning Berg’s upbringing and mental fragility. Just like Berg, she was raised by a single mother, after having her father walk out on them early on. As typically is the case with art, writing was her chosen outlet for catharsis.

Berg’s phantasies about killing his father draw an unmistakable Oedipal territory without falling into the usual cliches. The second voice interspersed throughout the novel is of Berg’s mother - Edith, who is intrisincally present without ever being physically there. Her alter-ego-like role is marked by a piercing ambivalence, where the quotes found scattered in between paragraphs at times reflect unconditional love, while at others clear disappointment, or even despise for her son.

Quin flirts with eroticism in a bleak provocative manner, with sex and desire treated as crucial prisms to reach the darkest corners of the psyche and question aspects of identity and gender. No wonder Berg’s idealized solution for his existential ambiguity is “decide rather than desire“.

Dark humor and Berg’s self-deprecating nature offer much needed relief to the density of this highly fragmented, yet dagger-sharp narrative that will perplex and amuse the reader almost concomitantly.

This is hardly an easy read and will certainly make you work hard til the very last second to make sense of Berg’s sordid and ludicrous inner world. That said, if you’re willing to get enraptured by staggering absurdist brilliance give this one a go.

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

This feels very much a period piece. Fan that I am of B S Johnson, I thought I'd try out some of those contemporaries of his I had yet to read. Berg has that experimental 1960s vibe going on - an immature, sociopathic narrator, the narrative slipping between the first and third person (even second, on occasion), dispensing with syntax, chapter numbers or titles, dialogue, etc. Whereas Georges Perec's 1967 experimental piece A Man Asleep came vibrantly alive when I recently re-read it, for some reason, Berg failed to leap off the page.

I suspect it's probably just me. I think I've read too much "kitchen sink"-type writing from the era - The L-Shaped Room, Osborne, Wesker and all the rest. Additionally, I seem to have read a number of novels about humdrum putative murderers and murderees (Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry, The Driver's Seat, London Fields, etc.). All of these came after Berg, of course. Had I read Quin's book in 1964, I may well have been more taken with it.

And then there's Brighton, backdrop to the action, presented in all its seediness - rundown B&Bs, savage gulls and grey seas. Depressing. Brighton seems to me a town that changes. When first I knew it, it felt prosperous and the height of cool. Visiting after an interval of some years, it appeared exactly as presented in this novel, dreary and down-at-heel. I even stayed in a bed and breakfast that resembled the one in which Berg temporarily resides. It's been on the up again in recent times, so I'm told (didn't Mr McCartney have a place there?). I'm more of a Portsmouth man myself. Now that would make a setting for a novel...

There are pronounced absurdist elements at play. Berg spends many pages carrying around a dummy in a rug, believing it to be the corpse of his father, murdered at his own hands. If this dark farce had been written by Beckett, it would have been comical. It puts me in mind of a very similar and funny passage in If on a Winter's Night. Here, it just feels like a missed opportunity. And while Berg is a would-be murderer, he's also a mummy's boy, forever squeezing his zits. His lust interest (Judith) and mother (the similar-sounding Edith) seem to get mixed up in Berg's brain. This is all very Oedipus Rex, of course.

For me, the denouement was the strongest section, that famous opening sentence aside ("A man called Berg, who changed his name to Greb, came to a seaside town intending to kill his father..." - she paid attention to that writing tip, at least). It's very much in the du Maurier/Hitchcock vein with its macabre turn of events and sinister gulls. And Quin is certainly pretty successful in her gender ventriloquism - a difficult act to pull off. Like any self-respecting modernist/ experimental text, the narrative has to be a stream of consciousness of sorts. That dense prose is sometimes poetic, though, approaching the state of adoxography:

"Conscious of sound, gulls hovering, crying, or silent at rarer intervals, their swift turns before being swallowed by the waves. Then no sound, all would suddenly be soundless, treading softly, dividing rocks with fins, and swordfish fingers plucking away clothes, that were left with your anatomy, huddled like ruffled birds waiting."

I'm not actually sure what any of it means, but it reads nicely...

Speaking of missed opportunities, a thought occurs to me (that happens at least once a week). Why hasn't this book been combined in a 196os experimental compendium with Anna Kavan's Ice? It'd make a great title.

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A lot of British novels from the 60s and 70s feel especially dated to me, with the writers gingerly or enthusiastically trying to dwell on sex, psychology and squalor without a clear grasp of at least the first two. I won't name names.

This 1964 novel is so absolute in its understanding of all 3, and in addition of squeamish farce, that it feels both fresh and timeless. With a no frills narrative that sometimes lapses into a sticky, surreal underground of consciousness, Berg tracks a revolting man through his confused, sordid mission of patricide and proxy Oedipal undoing in the seedy side of a seaside town. By turns shocking, horrific and horrifically entertaining, and with a rapier thrust of plot, this is one to read rapidly and have nightmares about.

[Herman · Rating 4 out of 5]

****1/2

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 3 out of 5]

(3.5) Quin’s first novel is a bit of a squirm-inducing affair. Reading it was like going to a low-key party where you don’t particularly like any of the attendees but they’re all mildly interesting enough that you decide to stick around, because, after all, you don’t have anything better to do and you’ve been to some other pretty good parties in this section of town where you’re almost certain you’ve seen some of these same people in attendance. After a few drinks you start chatting up the host and find that despite your initial doubts he’s oddly fascinating in an oblique kind of way. During the conversation he tends to wander off in his responses to your questions, instead speaking about himself in a vague and often unsettling manner, which over the course of the conversation comes to have a hypnotic effect on you, resulting in brief fugue states punctuated by moments of acute consciousness in which you find the host staring directly into your eyes, as if waiting calmly yet intently for your response to a question he has just posed. The disorienting nature of this dialogue eventually forces you to make up some excuse, need to refill your drink or whatever, so sorry, nice chatting with you, after which you go off and mingle with the other weirdos, except that you keep sensing the host behind you, or at least looking at you from across the room, somehow, from somewhere, retaining and attempting to enforce that tenuous connection the two of you had made during that recent bizarre exchange. Finally, discerning the waning state of the party, and never having been a fan of parties in their latter stages, or even parties in general for that matter, you edge toward the door and you’ve just about made it across the threshold when, wait, wait, he says, just wait a minute, let me show you out, the host ushers you through the doorway, outside into the cold damp sea air where he immediately proceeds to reengage you on some arbitrary to you point that he had been on the brink of making when, so sorry, you had broken off the conversation in order to get a drink was it? Well, it’s not important, except what he had to say apparently was and you can sort of see why when you approach it from a certain angle, after all it is somewhat of a universal story he’s trying to tell you, at least you think so, despite how he’s gone about it, the reluctance to be too forthright and all, but still feeling the need to repeat parts of what he’s trying to tell you, which does make you feel sad and a bit lonesome, not enough to want to go back inside with those people, but maybe enough to pat the host on the back with genuine feeling as you gently explain that now you really must be going and it was a pleasure to finally meet him, after having heard so much about him. And as the gate squeaks shut then, and you set off down the furrowed dirt lane you do feel compelled to turn around and as you turn you see him, the host, still standing out front on the porch, now looking out toward the sea, his back to you and yet you feel like somehow he knew you turned back and wanted you to see him looking out to sea, alone outside his home, which is full of people he doesn’t even like, and which he now has to return to and pretend to like until whenever they decide the party is over and leave.

[Justin Zigenis · Rating 5 out of 5]

A darkly poetic romp through a seaside town and the mind of a vengeful son; as if Crime And Punishment were an absurd poem.

So much creative imagery bookending concise dialogue and seamless shifts in perspective. I’m left somewhat confused as to why Ann Quinn doesn’t get more recognition.

Berg now occupies my re-read shelf.

[Inderjit Sanghera · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is a macabre and nightmarish element to the world created by Ann Quin in ‘Berg’; a world of shadowy somnolence, of darkness and depravity and unreliability as seen through the eyes of the narrator Berg, who visits Brighton to commit patricide but ends of taking his place, ensconced in a world of suffering domesticity which serves to stifle his innate darkness.

Berg, an anomic and anaemic outsider, travels to Brighton under the guise of Greb in order to murder his selfish and self-centred father who abandoned Berg and his mother when he was a child. Quite why Berg felt the need to change his name is a mystery; but then again most of Berg’s actions are shaped by a man who is fraying on the wrong side of sanity. This means that there is a streak of black humour running through the novel as Berg is constantly upended in his grandiose and increasingly grotesque schemes; the dead body of his father is replaced by a dummy, he is nearly raped by his father as he attempts to escape the suffocating flat disguised as a woman, his seduces his father’s wife only leads to his mother taking his father back in. Indeed, every one of Berg’s plans backfire, being the product of a mediocre and mendacious mind.

Quin’s prose ripples and refracts moment of odd, lurid beauty; “Shadow that over-ruled cracks in the pavements, a distorted double face in the windows. Hovering in front of noticed boards, scribbled messages, subtle to the degree of disonconcertion, or were they too obvious for others?” The sense of paranoia which hovers over Berg permeates the novel, as the reader can never really trust in Berg’s observations, with many of them being the fantasies and exaggerations of a deranged mind.

‘Berg’ is the work of a startlingly original literary mind which was tragically cut short; it is a shame that Ann Quin is now more widely know as she stands as one of the most innovative English prose writers of the latter half of the 20th century.

[Peter · Rating 2 out of 5]

In a miserable out-of-season seaside resort, Alistair Berg is planning to kill his estranged alcoholic father whilst taking a fancy to his dad’s new fake-fur consort. So we have vaguely oedipal goings-on – all communicated in Ann Quin’s slightly demented yet often effective prose – but with a narrative demoted from tragedy to farce, and characters demoted from archetypes to stereotypes.

It doesn’t really work. Even black humour requires comic timing, but Ann Quin spurns such niceties. So although the novel has all the ingredients of low farce – mistaken identities, doors continually opening and closing, a ventriloquist’s dummy, cross-dressing, a stuffed budgie, hiding in wardrobes – they are poor naked things, shorn of any humour. And too much of the novel is taken up in pursuit of this farcical narrative – complete with dead-on-its-feet, end-of-the-pier dialogue ("Now now Aly, oh you are naughty really you are.") – and rapidly becomes a bit tedious.

It may well be that this was Ann Quin’s bleak vision: life is an unfunny pantomime peopled by lifeless stereotypes in dreary surroundings. But, if true, it’s not much of a recipe for an interesting novel.

Liked the writing, pity about the content.

[Ihes · Rating 4 out of 5]

La falsa promesa de un thriller. Beckett reeescribiendo Hamlet. Un narrador que disfruta con la facilidad con la que el lector deposita su confianza en él. Lenguaje denso, prosa experimental. Alegoría y simbolismo. Pesadilla, fantasía, sordidez, depravación y oscuridad. Trastornos, una ciudad costera y la ilusión de un patricidio. Las fronteras entre la realidad y la imaginación. La forma al servicio del contenido. Los no-acontencimientos y sus consecuencias. Azar, orden e indecisión. Enhebrar experiencia a través de material imaginario. ¿A quien pertenece lo que el lector interpreta de una novela? ¿Al lector o a la novela? Una burla a las limitaciones de la razón. Una parodia del mito. Observar desde la ventana, espera, ¿o es un espejo? Merece la pena me preguntas, pero ¿por qué te fías de mi palabra? Sí, sí, léela, me gustaría hablar con alguien de Judith, de Berg, perdón de Greb, y de su padre. ¿No ves que le he dado cuatro estrellas? Un hombre que teclea buscando vuestra aprobación tiene que ser alguien de fiar, ¿no?

[Laura Brower · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hard to put exactly into words why this is so good. First off the writing style is the best kind of experimental, in that it's unpretentious, accessible and just washes over you like the grimy sea of the location; it's like watching little bits of the subconscious bobbing up from the surface creating a kind of macabre delirium which fits so well with the character. There's a slow, looping sickness that pervades the whole thing.... but also there's a beauty in the whole thing... and the way the book circles around itself from start to end is great. I don't think you should read the blurb for the book before reading this, as it does kind of spoil the premise.

[Lesley]

A grimy little tale of shame, body horror and Freudian perversity set in the 60s on the seedy south coast. The memorable opening line doesn’t mess about: “A man called Berg, who changed his name to Greb, came to a seaside town intending to kill his father.” Probably the only straightforward sentence in the whole text - it’s endlessly perplexing after that.

If ‘berg’ is a mountain in German, what’s a ‘greb’ - a mountain reversed? An abyss? That would certainly describe Alistair Berg/Aly Greb, a gaping chasm of Oedipal desperation, a psychological black hole. A festering stew of loathing, cruelty and need. The obsession with killing his father is about proving something to himself, becoming a Nietzschean super-man of pure action untainted by thought. Except not. His supreme act of volition descends into grotesque farce, and worse.

A greasy garbled queasy text. Pus, shit, and sweat seep from every page. Every physical detail is revolting: Berg senior’s clacking teeth and pathetic drunkenness; his girlfriend Judith falling out of her dress, her caked make-up her false eyelashes hanging off, Greb’s dirty collar, spilled hair oil and strewn untidy wigs. Boarding houses with dirty pink wallpaper, stained underwear, encrusted eiderdowns, furtive masturbating in the cinema, the smell of boiled vegetables. Cracks, fissures and slits gape disturbingly throughout. Bizarre mistaken identities involving a ventriloquist’s dummy, Greb in drag - no-one is who they seem. No, everyone is more than they seem.

The reader cannot avoid feeling soiled. And yet, and yet - it’s captivating. The cryptic prose and hallucinatory feel keep you hooked, despite the visceral revulsion. It’s an impressive trick to pull off. Such a curious text - so of its time (the sexual awkwardness of the 1960s), so post-modern (destroying narrative norms), so like a Greek tragedy, so its own thing altogether. Don't ask me if I enjoyed it. It was horrible. But an experience.

(Side note: multiple references to being swept out to sea, corpses being washed ashore etc horribly forshadow the author drowning herself off Brighton beach.)

[Ezgi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Berg bu sene okuduğum en iyi romanlardan biri. Kitap hak ettiği üne kavuşmamış bana kalırsa. Ülkemizde de pek ilgi çekmişe benzemiyor. Roman, ismini Berg olarak değiştiren Greb’in babasını öldürme öyküsünü anlatıyor.

Berg babasını ararken bir sahil kasabasında olduğunu bulur. Gider ve pansiyonda babasının yanındaki odaya yerleşir. Babasını ve sevgilisini izler bir süre. Babasının nasıl bir hayat sürdüğüyle ilgili düşünceleri, öldürme planları, annesi ve kendi hayatı gibi hemen her şeyi Berg’in iç sesiyle okuyoruz. Anlatımı muazzam derecede güzeldi. Annesinin sözlerini hatırladığı kısa satırlar Berg’in nasıl yarım bir hayatı olduğunu fark ettiriyor. Babasının terk etmesi ikisini de etkilemiştir. Yarım yamalak büyümüştür Berg. Büyürken babaya duyduğu nefret ve öfke ön plandadır. Annenin de normal olmadığını fark ediyoruz ilerledikçe.

Roman psikanalitik okumalara çok elverişli. Burada analiz edemeyeceğim ölçüde geniş bir alan sunuyor. Ödipal okuma yapanlar Berg ile büyük bir çalışmaya koyulur. Bastırılan duyguların yarattığı patlamalar çok az sahnede ortaya çıkıyor. Ama nedensiz bir şekilde kedi öldürmesi -ve bunu çok canice yapıyor- psikozlarını iyi yansıtıyordu. Bana Anayurt Oteli’ni hatırlattı bu sahne. Psikanaliz dışında otobiyografik ögelerin baskın olduğu da bir kitapmış. Yazarın hayatı ile de analiz edilebilir.

Bilinç akışını çok yaratıcı kullanan bir roman. Beckett ve Anna Kavan’a benzetilmiş. Buna katılmakla birlikte Berg huzursuz edici yanlarını boğucu bir şekilde anlatmıyor. Beckett’ta olan karamsarlık yer yer yoklasa da daha sakinleştirici bir kitap. Bu senenin en iyilerinden olmasını hiç beklemiyordum başlarken.

[Julie Kuvakos · Rating 5 out of 5]

“In a moment fixed between one wave and the next, the outline of what might be ahead. On your back, staring into space, becoming part of the sky, a speckled bird's breast that opened up at the slightest notion on your part. But the hands, remember the hands that pulled your legs, that doubled you up, and dragged you down? Surprised at non-resistance. Voices that called, creating confusion. Cells tighter than shells, you spinning into spirals, quick-silver, thrashing the water, making stars scatter. Narcissus above, staring at a shadow-bat spreading out, finally disappearing into the very centre of the ocean.”

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredibly modern novel, written in 1964. It begins: "A man called Berg, who changed his name to Greb, came to a seaside town intending to kill his father..." How can you not read such a book? Another blurb: "A marvellously warped book..." --NYT. Sadly, the author drowned herself at the age of 37.

[Daan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ongelofelijk. Kon het niet neerleggen. Prachtige, bij vlagen absurde zinnen. Een verhaal dat compleet uit de hand loopt. Meesterwerk.

[Marc · Rating 5 out of 5]

This instantly became one of my favorite books after I finished reading (and then rereading) it. Ann Quin. Criminally underrated (or simply unknown) British author of four short novels, Berg being the first of them, was a schizophrenic who took her own life in 1973 by, like Viriginia Woolf before her, walking out into the sea and never returning. In Berg, we are meticulously drawn a picture of life in a seaside resort town to which our anti-hero Berg (whose name, as we are told in the almost-famous, or should-be-famous, first line of the novel, has been changed to Greb) has come to kill his absentee father. The thing is, Mr. Greb is in fact a "mirror image" of the man in many ways, and ends up sleeping with (and eventually shacking up with) the father's mistress, not to mention that he seems to be unhealthily attached to his mother, who writes him seemingly innocent letters that, at times, sound very passive-aggressive indeed. ("Freud with a headache" says Library Journal, rightly, I think.) The atmosphere of this novel, and the fact that Berg a.k.a. Greb is a salesman of hair tonic, reminded me a lot of Alain Robbe-Grillet's The Voyeur (in that novel the protagonist, Mathias, is a watch salesman; too, he comes to a town on the water for murder). In fact, the novel is often compared to work by Nathalie Sarraute; also Alexander Trocchi, though compared to, say, Young Adam, which I read shortly after reading this, the language is more dense, the style more experimental.

In any case, this novel will not appeal to everyone. While the storyline sounds as though it could be depicted as more or less a "realistic" one, the novel is not written in a realistic style, and some of the events that occur -- I'm thinking in particular especially of one involving Berg Sr.'s ventriloquist dummy, though I don't want to give the scene away -- seem highly unlikely unless one buys into the fact that a.) this is more of an allegorical novel than it is a realistic one, one that plays with genre: detective, vaudeville, etc., and b.) that the narrator is or is going insane. Though most of the narrative is written in third person, the camera's eye stays firmly fixed on the younger Berg for the most part (except when we get fragments of his mother's letters) and even occasionally drifts into first person for a few sentences here and there, without warning, before shifting back into third person (another technique often used by the aforementioned A. R.-G., though Quin had apparently not read the nouveau roman writers before creating her Berg, a fact that just goes to show that writers of all stripes and nationalities may arrive at similar places on their own, i.e. without necessarily being directly influenced by someone else's aesthetic).

In the introduction to the Dalkey edition, Giles Gordon quotes Quin as having said, "Form interests me, and the merging of content and form. I want to get away from the traditional form..." and here she certainly has, eventually earning her a reputation as a "difficult writer." But, of her four short novels, Berg is the one that is considered the most straightforward (I have, to date, only read this and her second novel, Three, the latter being much more prose poem-like than Berg, much less coherent in some ways, though still very good). Though I look forward to reading the latter two novels -- Passages and Tripticks -- I have a feeling, from what I have read about them, that Berg will remain my favorite of the lot. I highly recommend this book to anyone who likes experimental writing that engages with genre tropes in an intelligent and, ultimately, entertaining way. Not a word of text here is wasted, and if one does not read closely, carefully, one will miss a whole lot. But it is a short book, short enough to allow for such close reading, as well as for second, even third readings. I have a feeling that, when I eventually return to this book a few months or years down the road, and pick it up again, I will once again be swept up in its darkly humorous world of Oedipal triangles (Quin was obsessed with the number "three"), ventriloquist dummies, wandering vagrants, voluptuous women, and going-insane murderous protagonists. Again, this book may not be for everyone, but then neither is most anything really worth reading in my experience. Don't miss out on Ann Quin's Berg.

[Ka Vee · Rating 4 out of 5]

4,5 sterren

Uiterst bizar, maar zo hilarisch ook.
Echt van genoten. Een snuifje Houellebecq, enkele snippers Darrieussecq, een vleugje Murakami.
Een tintelende potpourri, ons door een unieke schrijfster voorgeschoteld in 1964.
Sterk. Zeer sterk !

[Justine Kaufmann · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5*

[Rein · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ann Quin deserves to stand next to Joyce, Döblin, Proust and Woolf, and her prose is much more accessible (though by no means easy reading, and it takes a moment getting used to). Berg is one of the best books I have read for a long time. I won't say more. Or perhaps just that there is very little modernist prose around where you would actually be thrilled waiting for what happens next. Having visited Brighton also helps, although the town is not mentioned by name.