Status Updates From G. : a novel

“It was she who appreciated better than any of them Faith, Beauty, the Longings of the Soul, Forgiveness, Innocence, Filial Piety, Love. If a guest, when talking, wished to evoke the spirituality of his experience, he turned towards her for confirmation; one nod from her, even the slow lowering of her eyelids, was sufficient to make him feel that he had been understood & that therefore he was telling the truth.”

“The sickly emphasize the unpredictability of the flesh: there is a kind of pathetic and grating sensuality about them. Esther looked delicate, fragile, as though she were made of some material other than flesh: a material which had been wrought and intricately finished so that there seemed to be no danger of it ever changing.”

When G. won the Booker Prize in 1972, Berger's acceptance speech scandalized his audience. He named the colonial sources of the Booker family fortune and pledged to share his prize money with the Black Panthers. It seems that those who were shocked by Berger's speech—despite the novel's trenchant anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist passages—had mistaken G. for a book about the past.

(It's mere coincidence that "lepidoptera" is so close to "lapidary," that "lepid" means scale and "lapid-" stone, but Berger as a stylist, with his movements between delicacy and density, is a butterfly catcher one second and a stoneworker the next.)

If Nuša and G. are like statues to the butterfly, then perhaps what we perceive as mere statues, as relics of a dead past, are also in a sense alive; we just have to apply the right time scale. By making the humans into stones, the butterfly has brought the stones surrounding Nuša and G. in the museum garden to life.