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Notting Hill Editions

What Time Is It?

What Time Is It?

by John Berger, illustrated by Selçuk Demirel, with an introduction by Maria Nadotti

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"Patience, patience, because the great movements of history have always begun in those small parenthesis that we call 'in the meantime.'" —John Berger

The last book that John Berger wrote was this precious little volume about time titled What Time Is It?, now posthumously published for the first time in English by Notting Hill Editions. Berger died before it was completed, but the text has been assembled by Maria Nadotti (who also provides an introduction) and illustrated by his longtime collaborator and friend Selçuk Demirel.

What Time Is It? is a profound and playful meditation on the illusory nature of time. Berger, the great art critic and Man Booker Prize-winning author, reflects on what time has come to mean to us in modern life. Our perception of time assumes a uniform and ceaseless passing of time, yet time is turbulent. It expands and contracts according to the intensity of the lived moment. We talk of time “saved” in a hundred household appliances; time, like money, is exchanged for the content it lacks. Berger posits the idea that time can lengthen lifetimes once we seize the present moment. “What-is-to-come, what-is-to-be-gained empties what-is.”

Additional Book Information

Series: Notting Hill Editions
ISBN: 9781912559145
Pages: 120
Publication Date:

Praise

John Berger writes about what is important, not just interesting. In contemporary English letters he seems to me peerless; not since Lawrence has there been a writer who offers such attentiveness to the sensual world.
—Susan Sontag

In his ceaselessly inventive work, Selçuk often uses parts of the body in ways that are characteristically Turkish...as if the comedy of the human condition were there in the human body, in the melancholy of anatomy.
—John Berger

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