John Berger and Me

The memoir of a deep friendship between two important intellectual figures bound by their interest in art and their experience of migration.

In John Berger and Me, the eminent Australian sociologist Nikos Papastergiadis recalls his relationship with the late English writer and art critic John Berger. His memoir is both a portrait of their friendship, and an account of the work of his former mentor, one which combines Berger’s abiding interest in migrants and migration, with Papastergiadis’s reflections on his own family’s experience of migration.

Berger was a successful author and artist who lived in England before he moved to a peasant village in the Haute-Savoie. Papastergiadias’s father was born in a peasant village in Greece and migrated to work in factories in Australia. The memoir covers a period of ten years in the 1990s when the younger Nikos spent many summer months with the distinguished author, living in the family house and sharing duties such as the gathering of the harvest. It draws on personal memories, his deep knowledge of Berger’s work, which was the subject of his doctoral thesis, and anecdotes of life in the village, and beyond. The intertwining of their common experiences means that the book is both a biography and an autobiography, as well as a tribute to one of the most significant cultural thinkers of recent times.

This is a book about love, about love in all its forms: the love between a parent and child, a student and a mentor, and most profoundly, the love between friends. The pleasures of camaraderie and the tenderness of affection are threaded throughout a book in which theory never undermines the radical hope of friendship. It’s a glorious homage and glorious book.
Christos Tsiolkas

A supple and luminous book, John Berger and Me interweaves two lives – the subject, now an icon, a visionary thinker, artist and writer, and the author’s own fascinating journey from his immigrant, working-class roots to public intellectual. Compellingly written, interweaving memory, portraiture, autobiography and the history of ideas, John Berger and Me is above all about memory. In tracing their lives together, Papastergiadis delicately unfurls stories of his own ancestors and family. A lyrical and subtle homage, in its pages Berger is as present as you can be in a work of literature – a floating, live ghost. Above all, Papastergiadis has written a perceptive and illuminating narrative about the power of art to not only reflect or represent reality, but to create it.
Jean McNeil

A remarkable book drawing on a close relationship of over twenty years. Two lives, historically entwined and beautifully told through careful observation and detail… a book for our time.
Huw Beynon

Wonderful and heartwarming… If John Berger found his metier as a storyteller, then Papastergiadis must surely have joined him, and done him proud.
Marsha Meskimmon

A memoir, a love song, an intimate history, a choreography of sensations and states of mind and successive selves, a Bildungsroman… beautiful, moving, memorable.
Ranjit Hoskote

For a respected Cambridge-educated sociologist who pursued his doctorate on Berger, John Berger and Me is simply told and deeply personal: it is not the work of an academic but of an engaged reader – and a good friend – of his subject. It asks only that we respond to Berger with something of his own considered zeal.
Geordie Williamson, The Saturday Paper

This is a book that offers aficionados of Berger’s oeuvre an intimate encounter with the man and his way of being in the world.
Sydney Morning Herald

Reading this book is somewhat akin to spending an evening with an old friend, enjoyably surrendering to conversations that loop through memories, intellectual preoccupations, hopes, fears, observations and the emotional landscape of life, seeking to make sense of the world and find a true place within it. John Berger and Me is an elegiac and heartfelt tribute to a friendship and a moving reflection on the changing pace of human existence and the ‘loss and love of home’.
Elke Power, Readings

[John Berger and Me] deserves to be nominated for the various book prizes that are on offer in Australia and internationally –it is a book of exceptional creativity and quality. The book has the potential to garner the widest possible audience, not only among scholars interested in John Berger and the cultural politics of the arts, but also more generally those interested in his most fascinating life, his critical relationship to the forces of modernity on the one hand and his ability to enjoy the abundant beauties of nature and a simpler rural life on the other.
Fazal Rizvi, Neos Kosmos

The book is, at times, a memoir, an homage, a tribute and gift, an elegy, a reflection, and an Upanishad (a sitting-at-the-feet-of-the-master-and-learning), but also a meditation on history. If I could reduce it to a sentence, this book is an attempt, following Berger’s own advice, to ‘hold everything dear’… As a personal account, it is both tender and searching.
Giacomo Bianchino, Australian Book Review