John Berger’s Bento’s Sketchbook, an exploration of the practice of drawing, as well as a meditation on how we perceive and seek to explore our ever-changing relationship with the world around us, is now onsale from Pantheon.
John Berger’s many books include Ways of Seeing, the fiction trilogy Into Their Labours, the Booker Prize–winning novel G., and To the Wedding.
“Bento’s Sketchbook is a literary work that epitomizes the wonderful world of imagination and play, and a reminder of how we can truly see—if only we can slow down…Highly recommended.”
—New York Journal of Books
“Berger steers away from direct answers to the mystery of the artistic impulse or the many other questions he poses in this short book. But the value of this impressionistic work lies less in those answers than it does in exposing us to new ways of encountering the world.”
—Shelf Awareness
“Warmly engaging, philosophical, unpredictable, and, at times, almost unbearably moving… Berger’s signature cultural fluency, compassion, and profound sense of beauty and justice coalesce exquisitely in this sketchbook.” —Booklist
“A deceptively brief volume offers profound meditations on art, the creative process and so much more…Whether he’s extending an analogy that compares making a drawing to riding a motorbike or discusses storytelling in a manner that could apply just as well to drawing, he makes such interaction and interconnection seem central to the human condition. Berger’s readers will see with fresh eyes.”
—Kirkus, starred review
“Someone familiar with John Berger as a writer, might have guessed the Spinozian bent of his humanity. Someone familiar with John Berger the art critic certainly knows of his visual sensibility. What a feast it is, then, to discover these two strands of Berger’s astonishing body of work united in this treasure of a book.”
—Antonio Damasio, author of Self Comes to Mind
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