Isabelle: A Story in Shots

by John Berger, Nella Bielski

In 1897, Isabelle, aged twenty, left Geneva for Kenadsa, at the Moroccan frontier. Gripped by spiritual restlessness and a desire to transcend the artificial constraints of society, she journeyed into the Sahara, into the heart of Islam. There she revelled in the languorous warmth of the nights and the sensuous beauty of the people. Dressed as an Arab youth, she smoked kif, took innumerable lovers, and made dangerous trips alone across the desert. She married Sliman, a French army sergeant, and became a mystic healer.
Her freak death in a flash flood ended a brief life of disturbing contradictions, for Isabelle was a European turned Arab, a Christian who became a Sufi, a woman who passed for a man.

Genres: Plays

92 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

John Peter Berger was an English art critic, novelist, painter and author. His novel G. won the 1972 Booker Prize, and his essay on art criticism Ways of Seeing, written as an accompaniment to a BBC series, is often used as a college text.

Later he was self exiled to continental Europe, living between the french Alps in summer and the suburbs of Paris in winter. Since then, his production has increased considerably, including a variety of genres, from novel to social essay, or poetry. One of the most common themes that appears on his books is the dialectics established between modernity and memory and loss,

Another of his most remarkable works has been the trilogy titled Into Their Labours, that includes the books Pig Earth (1979), Once In Europa (1983) Lilac And Flag (1990). With those books, Berger makes a meditation about the way of the peasant, that changes one poverty for another in the city. This theme is also observed in his novel King, but there his focus is more in the rural diaspora and the bitter side of the urban way of life.