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    Berg
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    Berg
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    Berg
    Ebook173 pages2 hours

    Berg

    By Ann Quin

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

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

    So begins Ann Quin’s first novel, a debut ‘so staggeringly superior to most you’ll never forget it’ (The Guardian). Alistair Berg, hair restorer, shares a mistress with his father. He will, he decides, eliminate his rival. After mutilating a ventriloquist’s dummy, he finds himself accidentally seduced by the man he needs to kill. Mordant, heady, dark, Berg is Quin’s masterpiece, a classic of post-war avant-garde British writing.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAnd Other Stories
    Release dateMar 7, 2019
    ISBN9781911508557
    Unavailable
    Berg
    Author

    Ann Quin

    Ann Quin (1936–1973) was a working-class writer from Brighton, England. She was at the forefront of British experimentalism in the 1960s along with B. S. Johnson and Alan Burns, and also lived in the United States in the mid-sixties, working closely with American writers and poets, including Robert Creeley. Prior to her death, she published four novels: Berg (1964), Three (1966), Passages (1969) and Tripticks (1972). A collection of short stories and a fragment of her unfinished last novel, The Unmapped Country (edited by Jennifer Hodgson), was published by And Other Stories in 2018.

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    Reviews for Berg

    3.5/5

    36 ratings1 review

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    • 4/5
      Hair-tonic salesman Aly Berg, alias Greb, comes to a South Coast resort in the depths of winter to murder the father who abandoned him and his mother twenty-eight years earlier. The result is a strange, dark farce, obviously strongly inspired by Beckett, but with more than a hint of the Tony Hancock/Monty Python tradition (making copious use of props like a ventriloquist's dummy and a number of dead pets). There's so much confusion with the dummy that we — and Berg — lose track of whether the father is actually dead yet or whether it's the dummy that Berg has murdered yet again; when the actual murder does take place, it hardly seems significant any more. Berg/Greb is clearly deep in Oedipus country, attracted to his father's repulsive girlfriend Judy and in love with his possessive offstage mother, but there's also a bizarre episode where he dresses up in Judy's clothes for no obvious reason and his father tries to make love to him, and various same-sex episodes hinted at in his past. All very odd, but with a bouncy kind of energy that doesn't feel Beckettish at all, and full of unexpected language. A good argument for not visiting Brighton (or wherever it is), perhaps, but also a good argument for reading more Quin.