Reading Other People’s Mail. A Contrary review by Frances Badgett  “Every night I put you together—bone by delicate bone.” A nosy person by nature, reading through a whole trunk full of someone else’s letters is my idea of a great way to spend a rainy Sunday. Secrets revealed, implications made, the flourished handwriting of an author with time to spend on his words, the quick jags of someone in a hurry. And, of course, with the art of the handwritten letter slipping away from us, the pressed and wrinkled paper stirs up a kind of excitement, as if one were unearthing artifacts. But my passion for other people’s mail has never translated to epistolary novels. The toggle between two speakers, the ping-pong tedium of the structure, has often disappointed and bored me. Until now. John Berger’s From A to X: A Story in Letters is marked by the passion and fury of war, the agony of imprisonment and separation, and the despair of dusty towns wiped out by battles between Western helicopters and homegrown insurgents. A’ida (the “A” of the title) writes her lover Xavier letters, which he hides away in his cell. A’ida’s letters to Xavier, sent and unsent, stitch together to create a story that is deep, compelling, and mysterious. Berger creates a premise that the letters were given to him, the sent ones hidden in Xavier’s cell, the unsent ones brought from A’ida’s apartment by an unnamed messenger. With this, Berger begins the novel with mystery, coaxing the reader into reading the letters, while he plants little clues and frames the story. He postulates that there are secrets hidden in Ai’da’s words, that her experiences are euphemisms for her own political activity. He writes simply, “I don’t believe she played canasta,” indicating that her frequent mentions of the card game aren’t about black spades and red hearts. This tease creates the experience for the reader, who then dives into each description for clues. What is actual, what is a veil over her activities? What is written in the spaces between her words? Xavier’s responses are brief remarks written on the backs of A’ida’s letters. Instead of locking the reader into that to-and-fro of typical epistolary structure, Berger uses Xavier’s responses as a way of pulling us out of A’ida’s lyricism. His stark, factual, rage-infused political observations anchor A’ida’s euphemisms and veiled references. Citing Subcomandante Marcos and Hugo Chavez, along with his own strong statements of poverty activism, Xavier gives us a sense of himself, of the activism that brought him into A’ida’s life, and of the circumstances of his arrest. “Bolivia. 12 million acres of land given to landless rural workers. Another 142 million hectares will be redistributed, if plan works out, to 2.5 million people. A quarter of the population. Tonight, Evo Morales, you are here with us. Come and sit in my cell that measures 2.5m X 3m.” Berger uses these elegantly spare but revealing statements to full effect. Berger’s dedication of the novel to Ghassan Kanafani, a Palestinian writer and activist assassinated in 1972 by a car bomb, also hints at the author’s sense of justice and political passion, a passion that beautifully informs our sense of Xavier. But what gives the letters their narrative thrust is also the very element that keeps me huddled over that trunk on a rainy Sunday—the quiet, slow unfurling of the pure intimacy between A’ida and Xavier. A’ida not only illustrates her letters tenderly with drawings of her hands, she also fills them with affection and longing: “We are in the future. Not the one we know so little about. We are in a future which has already begun. We are in a future that has our name. Hold my hand. I kiss the scars on your wrist.” By focusing on A’ida’s letters, Berger rescues the novel from two potential pitfalls—heavy-handed polemics and tedium. Berger realizes that the poetry and intimacy of A’ida, with brief appearances of Xavier, is enough. And he’s correct. What he brings the reader is a story in which the personal and political are married, even as A’ida and Xavier endure their agonizing separation. As A’ida says, “To be in the world is pain—the poem is true—and my hands tonight want to console you.” Frances Badgett is Contrary’s fiction editor. She lives in Bellingham, Washington. Index of Reviews...>Reviews.htmlshapeimage_1_link_0
 

From A to X

John Berger

2008, Verso

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