Smoke

“In these pages, Demirel rather brilliantly provides images of togetherness that make literal Berger’s language, albeit without sentimentalizing it; these pictures recall a world that once had coherent meaning…Berger and Demirel show that nearly anything can be part of shared experience…Smoke, [Berger] concludes, is a ‘sign of mankind’—evidence not of man’s endurance but of the promise of companionship and stories shared.” —Jonathon Sturgeon, Art in America

“In contemporary English letters John Berger seems to me peerless. Not since D. H. Lawrence has there been a writer who offers such attentiveness to the sensual world with responsiveness to the imperatives of conscience.” —Susan Sontag
 
“I love this small book of intricate insight.” —Michael Ondaatje, (on Cataract)
 
“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, on Selçuk Demirel